Pioneering national drama: Ray Lawler's contributions to Australian theatre

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PIONEERING NATIONAL DRAMA: RAY LAWLER'S CONTRIBUT.IONS TO \
AUSTRALIAN THEATRE · , . . (
East Texas State University M.A.. 1986
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PIONEERING NATIONAL DRAMA,
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, RAY LAWLER_ 'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO AUSTRALIAN THEATRE
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William Scott Lancaster
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Submitted .. to the Faculty of the· G:r,aduate School of
East ·Texas State University
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for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
August, 1986
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PIONEERING NATIONAL DRAMA1
RAY LAWLER'S C.. ONTRN!UTION.. S TO AUS~RALIAN THEATRE
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Thesis Approved:
Thesis Advisor
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. ean foraduae Studies and Research
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COPYRIGHT 1986 by W. Scott Lancaster
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Advisor,
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ABSTRACT
PIONEERING NATIONAL DRAMA1
·RAY LAWLER •s.:coNTRIBUTIONS
' TO AUSTRALIAN THEATRE
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! ~.i.a m Scott Lancaster, M.A. t Texas State University
1 Dr.. Anthony j. Buckley
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The purpose of this study· was to identify how Ray
Lawler helped in bringing Australian t~eatre into the main­stream
of international drama, paving the way for a solid
indig~nous movement among fellow playwrights. while at the
same time bringing realistic Australian, characters to the
stage for the first time.
" - Lawler·· s status was scrutinized throu~h · an examination
of his kn.own body of plays, ·most notably hi~ . m~jor success,
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Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Reviews, commentaries,
arid sociological studies were., consulted to understand the
impa,c t Lawler had at home and abroad. Supporting the find-
_ing that Lawler did have a meaningful impact· on Australian ·
drama, a study was also made of th~ school of playwrights
who, for five years, foll9wed in his fo~tsteps.
In conclusion, it was noted that, ~hile_ Lawler did have
., - a profound effect on Australian playwriting,· he ~lso helped
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and internationally.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ·
I wo~ld like to thank Jan' Kemp, Marsha ·Blair, and
Frank Newhouse of the Interlibrary Loan Department at East
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Texas State University for their . help in gathering the
research m~terials needed for this study. I would also
like to thank Dr. Anthony J. Buckley, ·my thesis advis~r,
for ~is ~i~e and pati~nce throughout this project. I
would like to -especially thank the cast and crew of Summer
of the Seventeenth Doll for their time. 1a.nd hard work in
helping me to understand Ray Lawler better by sharing one
of his
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Chapter
1. Introduction
2. The Doll
Table of Contents
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3. The Bushman and Retreat from Realism.
4. -The Trilogy ..
5. "Slum Drama"
6. Dramatic Pioneer.
Biblio~raphy
~ Appendices
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2.
A Texan Production of The Doll
Figures ' Vita
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Letter to Patron • • • . . . . . . . . . .
Letter to the Editor of the Melbourne Sun.
Reply from the Editor of the Melbourne Sun
Reply to the Editor of the Melbourne Sun.
Press Release to the Melbourne Sun. . .
Program Cover, . . . . . . . . . .
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Program. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Program, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Program, • . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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CHA,PTER 1
Introduction
I-On
28 November 1955 at the Union Theatre, Melbourne,
international recognition finally came to Australian drama.
On that night Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a new play by
unknown playwright Ray Lawler, had its premiere under the
sponsorship of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust .and
wlth the aid of the Playwrights Advisory Board. The Doll
became an instant hit at home and later abroad. Lawler fol­lowed
with several lesser known and less memorable plays.
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Fellow playwrights, attempting to reproduce his suc~ess,
followed Lawler with a spree of naturalistic dr~as set ~in ·
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the same mold as The Doll. Lawler's work and the genre he
inspired are the subject of this thesis. Chapter two will
deal with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, its history, and
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several of its productions. Chapter three wi11 deal with
Lawlerts next work, The Piccadilly Bushman, and two of his
' . lesser works, The ynshaven Cheek and The Man Who Shot the
Albatross. Chapter four will deal with The D,oll Trilogy, in
which Lawler wen~ back and wrote two more plays involving
the characters in The Doll. Chapter five will deal with
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"Slum Drama," the genre· Lawler inspired, concentrating on
• four of the plays of the periods The Multi-Coloured
Umbrella, by Barbara Vernon; The Shifting Heart, by Richard
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{ Beynon; The Slaughter of St. ,Teresa's Day, by Peter Kenna; • !? C
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and The One Day of the Year, by Alan Seymour.
Until the 194o's there were no plays of production
quality written by Australian ·playwrights. Because ~ re
was no theatrical organizati.Q. ~ to train riew pla~ights ~d
incub~te new plays, what local plays there were were ama-teurish
and and of poor construction. Commercial theatres
showed little interest in anything other than imported
plays which were promised moneymakers. In 19J8 the Play­wrights
Advisory Board was founded in Sydney to help the
aspiring nattve playwright. Its. aims were as follows,
Playwrights . and producing groups were to be cir- ·
cularized. The Board would offer to give opinions on
any long· or short play submitted to it, and for a •very
small fee. Criticism based on a number of readings
would be sent to the author of a rejected play, or one
which the readers thought might be made more workable .
after rewriting.. While the Board had no producing
machinery itself, plays accepted for its "passed" list
would be offered to various groups from among those
that had1indicated they would be i nterested to see such
scripts. ·
The Board was set up not only to critique new plays but also
as a clea~ing house for those worthy of production. Being
put on the Board's "passed _,list, however, did not neces­sarily
guarantee production. r For years regional playwrit­ing
competitions had offered their winners to various groups .,
with little success. Small theatres conducted private read- , -q
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i~ of locally written plays, · but only a token few reached
the professional stage in Australia,, whi.ph was mostly inter­ested
in plays imported from London after a successful run
in. the West End. Because there was litt le hope for local
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{ writers of ever having their ,plays professionally produced, • ,!-
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most talented playwrights were forced to make a living else­where
and did not perfect their craft. Production is an
essential step in wri'ting a play, and of _course an ncome
is needed by· any· artist whq qevotes full time to his wor~.
At this time the Australian theatrical network was set up
to sponsor only English playwtights. But fortunately for
Australian dramatists, the network did eventually turn its
interest away from England to -within itself for cultural
identity.
- After the Second World War ended there were new feel-
. ings of nationalism in Australia. Many citizens sougtt an
identity separate from Great Britain, and this . included ·. '- .
those in drama. In 1947 P~ime Minister J. B. ,Chifley asked
the British Council to help in assessing the possibility of
creating a National Theatre for Australia. Tyrone Guthrie
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was sent to evaluate the situation. rn his re'port he said '
that perhaps Australia needed a few more years of tutelage
under the British theatrical network. As H. G •. Kippax
explained, Guthrie's haughty personality and cocksuredness
had unexpected resu!ts, •
The suggestion that Australian t~ste may not be
ehtirely perfect and that Australia might, in cer.tain
matters, be a decade or two behind certain other com­munities,
aroused a tremendous head of ate~. Persons
who had not otherwise given a snap of their fingers to
support a national theatre felt a ·passionate eagerness
for Australia to possess such an institution, and~
passionate rage against the sneering, bl~qdy Pommy who
dared suggest that the time was not yet. - In defiance, Rusty Bugles was produced the very _~ext year.
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The play, written 'by noted ndvelist Sumner Locke-Elliott,
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is a tale of a group of soldiers stationed in the Northern
Territory during the war. It was the first to use authentic
Australian ~ernacular and colloquialisms. De(fPite the· fact
.that it played only i0 ustr~ia, it was a welcome indica­tion
to the country that they .could produce good drama, even
if only for themselves. Anti9ipation stirred as people
waited expectantly for another hit,...wt one never arrived,
Instead, there was a forgotten stream of bush plays con- -
taining little more than a chance for the writer to demon­strate
nis skill at transposing speech patterns. A critic
for the Bulletin described the plot of such a plays
. They consist mostly of an im_possible new-chum lost
in the .e:eat, dry interior, witn ra kangaroo in the
extreme distance, and an emu, or Erome other natural
songbird, thrown in as an extra. Also the story is
garnished by a shearers' riot, and a bushman's grave,
and there is the customary goldfield, and the hero
walks off unconcernedly with eight alleged cwt, of bul­lion
on his back. Naturally enough he is stopped by
thirty-eight bushrangers, but he puts down his load and
says, 'Wot 01' or someth~ng· like it, and slo~s thirty­eight
of them in the eye. Then Dampier finds it neces­sary
to bl.ot-out seven cwtA of the gold lest it should
break the hero's back, and he draws his pen through.·
thirty-four of the largest bushrangers, so as .to make
them more manageable, and when he comes across a woman
who was lost for eighteen days without food or water,
he fixes branches on to ~er and turns her .into a tree
as a sacrifice to probab!lity, and just when he has got
over those difficulties he finds that the new-chum il'.1_
the first act has been altogether forgotten, and must
be struck out altogether or else be used as .an abori­ginal,
Generally he gives up at this point 9.11d another
Australian drama goes to join the heap under -the
table .J · .
It is plain to see why they were. re~dYi or a change. Those
who longed for such a change came to re.~ize that fertile
ground needed to be prepared from which the fledgling dra•m a
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could emerge.
Trust formed.
Thus was the Australian Elizabethan Theatre . .,lo . •
Theatre of Australians by Au~tralians for
~stralians became the by-phrase for the Trust. Early in
1954 Dr. H. C. Coombs, governor of the Commonwrilth Banlc
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Who W~S intere~ted in the perfqrming arts and was lookjng
for a new sideline, made . a personal announcement saying that
such a.n org~lzatio~would be ,~o~ed,' elaborating its pur­poses
in Meanjins
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The ultimate aims must be to establish a native
drama, opera and ballet. which will give professional
employment to Australian actors, singers and dancers
and furnish opportunities for those such as writers,
composers and 8-lj:tists whose creative work is re_lated
to the theatre.
Coombs' idea was not to establish an actual theatre build­ing
or a performing group, but rather to encour~and sup­~
ort existing groups which met minimum requirements. He and
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the board of directors excited the public and raised a con- . ..
siderable amount of ·money; and then thet brought in English-man
Hugh Hunt as the first director of the Trust. Fresh
from assignment at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Hunt brought
to Co9mbs 1
· idealism a practical knowledge of the commercial
theatre.
In 19i4 the Playwrights A•d visory Board offered ~wo hun-dred
pounds to the best play submitted. Out of one hundred
and thir~ scrtpts, first place was divided between Oriel
Gray's The Torrents and Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seven-
. . teenth ·Doll. Part of .. their prize wa.s that the Board would
seek to negotiate a production. Both .n~w plays were offered
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to the newly formed Trust. Arrangements were made with the
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,N Union Theatre at the Univers-if.ty of Melbourne, and in 1955
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the Trust sponsored, as its first loca, ly written play,
Summer of'~he Seventeenth Doll.
.,.--' The Doll was greeted with an enthusiasm and an admira-tion
which sometimes seemed to turn to awe. After its or i­ginal
.production it toured the entire continent. People .
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drove for thousands of miles to see it, one man even swam a
river. National pride· supported The Doll and finally
opened the door for Australian playwrights to stand up and
be counted with the rest of the world's dramatists.
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Notes
1 Leslie Rees, The Making of Australian Drama (Sydneys
Angus and Robertson, 1973), P• 476.
· 2 H. G. Kippax, "Drama," in Australian Society, A
So~wical Introduction (n.p., n.p., n.d.), p. 506, cited
by William Ralph Levis, "An Experiment with Identi tys Aus­tralian
Drama from 1969 to 1974," Diss. Univ: of Minn.,
1977, p. J.
J Bulletin, J Jan. 1891, p. 7, cited by Virginia Kirby­Smi
th, "The Development of Australian Theatre and Drama,
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1788.:..1964," Diss. Duke Univ., 1969, PP• 84~5.
4 Her bert Cole Coombs, Meanjin, Winter 1954, n. pag.,
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cited. by Rees,. pp. 250-1.
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CHAPTER 2
The Doll
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The decade of the 1950's brought the winds of change
to an until then r~latively complacent Australian society.
These changes are mirrored. in Ray Lawler's highly successful
play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, known now to critics
simply as The Doll. Written in 1954, The Doll won several
writing awards before it was chosen in 1955 as the first
locally written play to be sponsored by the newly formed
Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, an organization dedi­cated
to the establishment of an indi{enous Australian
_ drama. ,
Like the Irish movement which had nurtured the growth
of a nationalistic drama there, the Trust had been formed
by Australians who were. ready to work for the emergence of
a truly Australian form of drama. Noted theatre cr itic and
historian H. G. Kippax saids •
The audience were ~n .a mood to receive a good
Australian play. Australia's expanding secondary
industries and its diminishing depend.enc~ on British
markets and British power were produci~ impulses to .
be self-reliant. A new kind ·of pragmatic, unromantic
nationalism was in the making. From it there flowed, •
besides an independent foreign policy, an increasing
middle-class interest in the development of conspic­uous
methods of1national self-e"J@re~sion as means of
self-assertion •.
Australians were indeed ready when on 28 November· 1955 The
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r Do~l had it~ premiere perfo~~ance at the Union Theatre in
Melbourne. Each successive night brought- more praise, more
revenue, and more acco~ades for Lawler's script. The play
transferred to Sydne~ and from there it went u't in several
productions all over the con·tinent, where it was received
with ~agerness, pride, and a~ by many who had never before
seen~ play, much less a play) abo~t themselves and their
lives. It is to this day considered by many to be the most
ma~Mally written play by an ·Australian. At the very
least it is a ~ajor milestone in the development of Austra­lian
drama. Theatre critic Wal Cherry proclaimed in 1964
that its arrival was inevitable,
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Sooner or later somebody ~as bound to come up with
a play, big enough in its own right, which would fuse
the foreign with the vernacular, and create from the
rough tradi~ions of the Australian drama a convention
strong enough to sustain a dramatic vision whieh is
almost too close for comfort-to our own hearts. Mr.
Lawler has done this, and done it magnificently. Sum­mer
of the Seventeenth Doll is the' ll)OSt playable, the
most t~eatrically sound play by an Australian yet pro-duced.
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And so it was that in 1955 Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
came along as a culmination of many hopes and dr7ams.
Universal. in theme while typically Australian in char-acter,
it tells a story of fai•l ure, a faPlur-e which · inevit- .
ably comes to us all. It is failure to re1J1.ain young·, to
remain intmutable. It is a tale of aging and the ability or
inability people have in coping with the social and emo­tional
changes which oocur when we and our envr ronment suf­fer
the effects of time. This motif, common as it is to
all men, was particularly appropriate to the socie~y from
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which it sprang, an Australia rising out of its insulated
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~ childhood, looking wistfully back to the past and apprehen­sively
ahead to a future in w~ich many felt displaced. A
country which had maintained its youth longe '9han most be-
~ cause -of seclusion was suddenly finding itself more and
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more a part of a brave new world. But where did this play,
The Doll, come from that seeme,. d to embody all of these
social and cultural dreams and visions? It came from a
re~~ly unknown playwright and actor named Ray Lawler.
Ray Lawler was born in 1921 in Footscray, a suburb of
Melbourne, Victoria. He left school at an early age to find
work during the Great Depression. He later attended drama
classes in the evening and joined Sid Turnbull's Melbourne
Repertory Company. In 1954 he . joined the Union Repertory
Company in Melbourne. In 1955 that group, under the aus­pices
of the Trust, presented Lawler's tenth play, Slc.unmer
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of the Seventeenth Doll.· The play was an immediate success
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despite the fact that it took quite a bit of convincing
before the Trust would even consider a local play, as evi-
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denced in this excerpt from t he correspondence of Hugh
Hunt, then director of the .. Tru.s ts ·
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll interested me far
more but ••• it lacks dramatic impact and, for this
reason, would, I think, be unsuitable for the large
theatres. Both these plays (referring to Oriel Gray's
The Torrents) should, I think, be done at the little
theatres to start with. I think the Trust would be
int erested in providing a guarantee against loss for
Lawler's play if~ suitable producti on can be found.
I wonder if Doris Fritton would like to undertake it
at the Independent ••• or, better st~ll, whether the
Union Theatre, Melbourne, would do - it?
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Luckily for Australian drama, Mr. Hunt and· the Trust took
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the risk ~d helped produce L.awler • s play. Hunt• s ~ssign-me
nt before the Trust was at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin,
and many hoped for a ranaissance comparable to...,,that which
had taken place jn Irish drama. Critic Lindsay Browne was
so excited at the premiere th~t he forgot that the first
reaction the Irish had to its 1own nationalistic theatre had
been negatives
This fine play,_ untransplantably Australian in all
~ accents, gave Australian the·atre-goers the chance
to feel as American audiences must have felt when
O'Neill first began to assert American vitality and
independence in drama, or as the Irish mus~ have felt 4 when Synge gave them The Playboy of the Western World.
Unlike Synge, who had to wait for his work to catch on with
the Irish audience and critics, Lawler was immediately
thrust into the national and and international spotlight.
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He wro·te several plays after The Doll but none of them equal
its success. In The Doll he captured 1t}1e voice of his
nation.
Extreme isolation has always been both a blessing and .. a curse to Australia, shaping and molding its soci~ty. This
isolation, in union with attitudes engendered by the early
settlement of Australia as a ,enal colony by England, helped
to establish the so-called Australian Myth. This myth, that
a people can both love and hate a land for the same reason
at the same time, has nonetheless been yery strong despite.
the fact that only a small portion of Audtralians today are
actually descended from convicts. Often faflJely accused and
unjustly tried in English courts, transported as ·far as pos-
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sible from everything they knew, rejected and forgotten in
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. ~ a bizarre region, these early men and woman hated and
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feared the unknown land that loomed endlessly before them,
and yet found a love for it by its being so iiar'away from
that society which had banished them. Their bitterness and ....
hatred for the Engli~t system .was strangely matched by
their devotion to England as ~oth a social" and a cultural
leade It is the nature of th~ myth that both feelings
c well in the same person, paradoxical as it seems.
That anyone could live with such :3- paradox requir~s decep­tion;
deception with~n one's self and within a society. In
this case, distance lent enchantment by preserving a static
but comfortable balance, a balance reality would destroy,
and eventually did. As the years went by and war and con­flict
ravaged Europe and the rest of the world, Australians
found a new comfort in their isolated and private home. In
the midst of global fear and danger, Au' stralia went
unthreatened, alone and often forgotten. Even the First
World War posed no immediate threat. Australians fought and
died in battles, most notably at Gallipoli, but they were
halfway around the world figh»ing enemies who never showed
the slightest interest in the southern hemisphere. World
War Two burst the bubble of serenity, its Pacific arena
bringing danger much closer to .home. Australians were
jarred when Japanese planes bombed t~e city of Darwin on the
northern coast. Little damage was sustained, but the coun­try
was nevertheless violated and would . never be the same.
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Victory at war ended such t~r~ats, but peacetime advance-ments
brought a struggling Australia farther into the main­stream
of international life. Commercial airplanes
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decreased the travel time to Europe and . Amer~a'. bringing
new · t ~ade, new immigrants, a new cultural identity, and new
respo~sibilities. To many thi's was a blessing, a boost in
national pride which would benefit all. Others, such as
veterans who had seen the cruelty of the world, saw the
cpm,ges as an encroachment by hostile outside forces on what
had been a happy and blissfully worry free existence.
Regardless of anyone's opinion or actions, a momentum was
already set which nothing could atop. Australia was becom­ing
more than -an outback country, it was becoming an equal
member in world society.
Whereas earlier plays used the outback in showi ng how
the country affected its people, The Dotl is placed in
Carlton, a somewhat scruffy suburb of Melbourne. In a
nation which was nearly all metropolitan, it is notable
that this was the first popular play to be set in o.n e of
the larger cities. ~n this place, for sixteen summers,
barmaids Olive and Nancy have .entertained their boYt:riends
for five months out of the year and wa~ted patiently for the
other seven months while the men worked cuttfng cane in
Queensland. The lay-off season, as. they refer to their
summer with Roo and Barney, has been a wonderful time, a
time cherished by Olive, as she explains to Pearla
Compared to all the marriages I know, what I. got is-­is
five months of heaven every year ; And it's the same
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for them. Seven months ~they spend killin' themselves
in th~ cane season, and .'then they come down here to
live a little. That's what the lay-off is. Not just
playin' around and spendin' a lot of money, but a time
for~livin'. You think I haven't sized that up against
what ·other women have? · I laugh at them e¥J3ry time
they try to tell me. Even waitil') ' for !too to co,e
9ack is fuor~ excitin' t~an anythin' they've got.
But even before the play begins Olive's precious dream has
begun ·to crumble. Nancy has ~arried, leaving Barney with-
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out his usual mistress. Roo is broke, something at first
attributed to his having had a back injury, but later shown
to have been the result of age. As the play progresses
we watch the steady deterioration of a dream and of rela-
•
tionships which . eventually leads to this pathetic scenes
OLIVE1 I want what I had before. (She rushes··at him
and pummels his chest.) You give it back to me-­give
me. back what you've taken ••••
ROO1 .(Grabbi~ her wrists and holding them tight.)
Olive, its gone--can't you understand? Every
· . last little scrap of it--gonel ·
OLIVE1 I won't let you--I'll kill you firstl
ROO1 (Lashing at her, hurting hityelf at the same
time.) · Kill me, then. But there's no more
flyin' down out of the sun--no more birds of_
paradise. • • • (Go·ing down on one knee beside
her and striking the floor with his hand.) This
is the dust we're in and we're gunna walk throu~
it like everyone else for. the rest of ou.r lives.
In the end Roo and Barney are left with each other because
they have nowhere else to tura. Barney leads Roo o~fstage
1 ike a wounded animal, saying, "Come on, boy." Roo and
Barney and others like them are a product of 'the land, a
barren desert that requires wandering a~d endurance and a
fierce determination from those who would subdue it.
Forced to wrestle the land, they become hard and coarse,
but they prove by their manly tonicity that they .are its
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-~ r masters. In Roo and Barney~ a,; migratory pattern we can see
a microcosm of just what was happening to the entire coun­try,
the bush clashing with the city as the old is forced
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out by the new. These two men are a part of ._; he bush, they
are th~ world of ·yesterf:lay.
The Doll uses the well-made play, three-a~form per-_
fected by Ibsen, and it makes no new changes in the mas­ter's
design. Though it does use the Australian vernacular,
sontething relatively new to theatre audiences, this is some­thing
Rusty Bugles actually initiated. What The. Doll" did
~hat was truly original, and which set the pattern for a
whole school of writers .to follow, was to place its char­acteDs
in a seedy little house in a run-down section of
town, a house inhabited by people who, in spite of their
deep and often poignant feelings, cannot convey their
innermost thoughts. To do so is simplY, beyond their abili­ties
and experience. These characters seem to be r&pre­sentative
Australians, but after a closer look we know that
we would never meet such people on the street every. day •
In 1952, t~e time in which the play is set, cane cutters
such as Roo and Barney most c4'rt~inly existed, but ~hey
were by no means common and certainly did not personify
the common man of Australia. But in Roo and "Barney we can
see the themes of mateship and the outb~ck in a clarity not
possible in middle-class persons whose ' lives are affected
by more sophisticated factors than the ·land. Ray Lawler
later explained himself whyche chose to make his -characters
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cane cutters, j
What I wanted rather than a struggle wi~h the
rural elements was a job which could take men away.
I wanted a relationship that could be set up and the
.· m~m for part of the year would have to go,>way to· ful­f~
l whateve~ work they did, they could ffave~been sai­+
ors at-sea--that itinerant quality. They could have
been sailors going away--0fi a long sea trip and comi~g
back, it cou~d have been that quite easily and . this
set up circumstances in which the wome~· the rela- _
tionship had to live a 1 · fe of their own. They came·
together for a time, for· a lay-off, a gre t celebra­tion
·, and then each went independently on their way
again, so that each year something was achieved, some­thing
was cemented and h~ld and built on and yet it
- wasn't in any way a parallel to marriage • The ba~k­ground
of it, the cane-cutting. and the fact that they
followed the sun down, comi~ down from the north,
these were all incidentals,
Lawler might have chosen the canefields as the home of his
characters by chance, but because in Roo and Barney we see
the land as an isolated factor it is much more powe.rful and
more a true symbol of what makes Australia uniquv e. out­back.
A national characteristic, or any characteristic for
that matter, is defined best through a ~tereotyped indivi­dual
who is affected by nothing else; But The Doll is more
than just a display of stereotypes. Lawler•s firm grasp on
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theme and plot and his skilled ·writing style keep The Doll
from becoming just a bizarre character study.
r
Realistic drama of this period is noted for its use of
violence, and in The Doll violence occurs. T_hese people
are inarticulate, and as such they cannot verbally resolve ·
their differences. Instead, they attempt to resolve prob­lems
physically. This ·is the justification which makes
violence essential. Lawler handles such action well by
keeping a constant grasp on the story line. to which the
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violence always relates. When Roo and Barney or Roo and
Olive have a "blue" we know it is because they have deep
feelings, feelings we understand because they are direct
outgrowths of what has happened, and not simpiy' gratuitous • .
In lesser plays this is not t_p.e case and the violence ha~
no meaning beyond merely being a device. Besides the use
of viqlence, there are other distinguishing marks in~
Doll of this particular genre of realism.1 Tho.a- comes out
mos.:t notably in character treatment.
;-
Pearl in~The Doll represents a character that had
become well known to Australians, the outsider. She can be
.seen as the carping immigrant, the constant complainer, the
"winging Pommy bastard" who had harrassed native Australians
for so long. It is through her that much of the conflict
is fired. Her refusal or her inability to fit i ~ the
situation angers Olive and hastens the .f inal downfall.
Like any outsider, she is strange and awkward. She tells
Olive that she wants to fit in with the lay-off, to over­come
her strangeness, but she is secretly a liar. Like
many newcomers who seem callous because they cannot sea the
beauty of a thing out of the :p,ast, she wants to change the
•
si_tuation and the others' lives to suit herself. She wants
to marry Barney even before she has met him. ·. She also
serves the important function of allowing exposition to be
revealed to the audience in a natural wa~. Like the audi­ence,
she is wondering what has been going on here for the
- past sixteen summers. It is through her prying questions
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that the audience learns what has transpired. We are sym-
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~ -pathetic with her for her confusion and her incapacity to
fit in with the others, as audience we identify with her
position because we also are newcomers to th ~elationships,
but~ also understand why and how she could elicit anger
. .
and frustration from Olive, w~o desperately wants Pearl to
fill the gap left by Nancy so , that everything ~ill stay
unchanged.
- Olive's mother, Emma, is a source of humor and wisdom,
· and as such she also becomes an important drarqatic device,
the raisonneur. In most cases, when time that should have
been spent on plot development is instead spent on a display
of manners and on needless tangents involving perhaps inter­esting
but nonetheless nonessential characters~ as was the
case with many of Lawler's co~rary imitators, . the plot
and theme are improperly matured. A de,n ouement is then
hurri~dly summed up in a speech delivered by some knowing
and wise person, the raisonneur. nu.s rson explains to
fellow characters and the audience just what has happened . and what the consequences will be. The Doll does not need
this device, but because L~wlir uses it anyway, he created
what many critics felt was a major flaw in the writing.
Plot and theme are always clearly defined and there is no
need for this speech which Emma delivers to Rooa
You listen--before Barney started to get the brushoff
from women, he oniy skited. Now he"lies. Work it out
for yourself. When did he start lyin' about you? Eh?
Yeh, I might be a damned old fool around the place,
but I can still nut this one out. · You and Barney are
two of a pair. Only the time he spent chasin' wimmen,
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. ' you put in bein' top dog! Well, that's all very fine
and a lot of fun while ··i t lasts, but last is one
thing it just don't do. ..' There 's a time.. for sowin'
and a time 8for reapin'--and reaping is what you're
doin' now.
To Lawler .this may have seemed the only way &ali ty co·uld
get tprough to Roo, but to m.a. ny critics it was extraneou·
and even pretentious.
Other things about The Di ll set the pace for a stream
of plays which followed. The use of a single set and a
sm~l cast of characters seem petty but was a practical
19
· necessity if new plays were to be produced. More signifi­cantly,
there is the use of symbolism, used expertly by
Lawler but rather ineptly by hi's followers. The doll is an
obvious child symbol, and the conferral of it by Roo to
Olive is i tself a symbol of timelessness and rejuvenation.
Every summer Roo has given Olive a kewpie doll, and this
summer he presents her with the seventeenth. Through the
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cyclical pattern of giving, Roo and Olive can ignore
change, maintaining the illusion that time goes back each
year to the previous summer when Olive received the last .
doll. The doll itself, unlike real children such as the
neighbor girl Bubba, never ages. It always remains exactly
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the same, reinforcing the aspect of timelessness. But more
realistically, and even more hidden to Roo and Olive, the
dolls are the lifeless offspring of an unhappy, barren, arid
lifeless relationship. Throughout all ~he years the cha,r,,- - acters have remained unaware of the· dolls' symbolic func-tion,
regarding them merely as gifts o~ love.
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For nearly seventeen ye~rs Roo, Barney, and Olive have
lived seemingly ageless 1·ves filled with youthful happi-ness,
are just too
with Dowd;
dowed Roo for years.
ot continue. The tides of change
ingratiates himself
the same way he sha­A
born follower, he needs a strong _
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leader. Roo is crushed by thi rejection.
.
Mounting tension
and bitterness explode in a fight between the two men,
destroying their friendship. As Barney packs to leave with
Dowd, Roo finally realizes that he cannot control events
any longer, he must bend with them. Barney may find himself
another "1ittl,e -· tin god," but for Roo the path is not so
easy. For years he and Olive both have shunned the idea
of marriage, but now with no other alternative, Roo faces
cruel reality and proposes to her. For Olive this .is
unacceptable, Her one comfort 9+1 thesp years, the thing
that she t ells her married friends, is that what she and
Roo have is better than marriage. Marriage after that many
years of what they had would betray the validity o.f that
unique relationship, make it meaningless, idenitfy it as a
dead end. Unable to change like Nancy, unable to a~apt to .. a new world, Olive simply refuses to accept any compromise.
She angrily pummels Roo in the chest and walks off trance­like.
She will have _no part of the. new_ world, preferring
/ to live in a fantasy of the past.
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Who will inherit this new world? Nancy and others
like her who can and will adapt out of the past will surely
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{ survive in it, but at a lo~s ;of self. Roo and Barney leave
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together,
have seen
said
Reality",
_hope in their"{uture? We '
man Australian dream die, as ~erry Goldie
cle "Dolls~ Homes and the Anger of
e "two eagles" of ·Doll depend not on family bl!t
o other. In Australian literary history Judith
Wright notes "the unspok4n assumption that the male­to-
male relationship alone can be trustworthy and
uncomplicated." Tom Inglis Moore, maintaining that
this was not confined to ' literature, states that in
- the beginning, mate ship "was itself a strong, pr_actical
reality in the bush world, an efficient and often
necessary method of handling the hard facts of the
world·, such as hardsh·i~, danger and isolation."
Moore's perhaps romantic belief in mateship and ·the
bush myth is reflected in the dream worlds of Barney
and Roo. They see the glories of mateship and "the
hard facts" of their lives as great ennobling features
of Australian existence. Moore asserts that "Summer
of the Seventeenth Doll shows how the loyalty of mates
can break under strain, and though Roo and Barney go
off together at the end of .the play they leave a bat­tered
mate ship behind them as well as a broken· doll."
Moore's error is that rather than a battered mateship
it .is the battered mateship. It is not just the rela­tionship
of Barney and Roo that iJ over, the old ideal
of mateship is past. When Barney did not leave the
canefields with Roo, the road downhill for mateship
was clear. The bush life is given over to Dowd, who
lacks this single-minded devotion to an ideal, and Roo
is r~ady to foresake Barney to propose marriage to
Olive.9 •
Roo and Barney, their lives b,a, ttered and broken like the
doll, have most certainly lost a great deal of their lives'
meaning. Only in Dowd and the neighbor girl, Bubba, do we
I
see a real promise for the future. Goldie also saids
Dowd• s triumph over Roo is no·t the rise of the -new
ideal hero but neither is it a simple rejection of bush
experience. Part ·of the change is suggested by Dowd's
potential relationship with Bubba, who says "this is
the only chance I've ever had of cemin' close to--I
dunno--whatever it is I've been watchin' all these
years." She goes on to tell Roo "I '11 have what yqu
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had--the real 'Rart of -it--.but I '11 have it differently.
Some way I can-have it s~e and know that it's going ,
to last." · That word "real" seems to suggest the
change for Dowd and Bubba, now called Kathy. They
ill continue the ex:perience but they witb not allow
pe associated illusion~.to defea~ them.
Lawl 's
d Dowd, ·who see the beauty of the past along with
s, faults, and p~tfalls are the true heirs of
Though less qedicated to the ideal, they ,.
are realistic enough to keep what they have and make it
work for their future.
,- The Trust, Lawler, and all those involved with The
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Doll in Australia looked with trepidation and a little fear
on the prospect of taking the production out into the
world. Not only were they wondering what the critical
reaction to it would be, they were concerned also that
international audiences would think that all Austr~ians
were like the characters in The Doll. But the step had to
I
be taken. Overcoming doubts and obstacles, The Doll went
on the road, or more appropriately, on the air in a plane.
Subsequent performances with an all Australian cast in
Edinburgh, Newcastle, and London proved to the rest of the
world, and reassured the homeland, that there was a rising .• .
talent down under. Bruce Gran~, a newspaper writer from
Australia who was living in London at the ti~e of the pre­miere
there, brought together several English critics'
reactions in an article he wrote in 1957 ,for Meanjin,
The English went for the play with as much enthu­siasm
as the Australians. The- reaction of the critics
left public opinion in no doubt. Unlike most contem­porary
plays The Doll did not divid~ the critics1 it
united them, high and low. The man from The Times was
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perha~ least touched,. yet he found the peopl~ of the
drama 'c uriously endearfng in the simplicity of their
toughness .' and concluded · that al though ·the evening wa's
never as exciti~ as it promised to be it was 'never
altogether dull. For readers of this newspaper such
restrained praise by no means signified damnation.
The popular press enjoyed itself immensely--sub-editors
~swell -as -critics. Th~ Daily Express heading 'The
Aussies Bring Us The Play Of The Year' was a fair sum-mary
the e~thusiasm of the critic, John Barber.
Qecil W lson of the Dailij Mail lost himself in the _
play 'raw humanity--a umanity that reduces our own
anaemic drawingroom plays to still life.'. The heading
was, 'This Doll Is Fair Dinkum, Cobber, Just Fair
Dinkum.' Alan Dent of the News Chronicle found the
play 'pure Australian' ahd remarked on the 'rich Aus-
- tralian accents, so remarkably like Cockney in their
vla.y.' The heading was, . 'New Play From Down Under Is
Just "Dinkum."' The tabloid Daily Mirror saids 'It's
A Wow From Down-Under' and described the play as 'rug­ged
as an Aussie on the spree' and 'raw, vital stuff
••• as powerful and intoxicating as Aust~alian
brandy.' The Sketch saids 'It's A Beaut, This Aussie
Hotchpotch' and, in four sentences of review, described
the male leads as 'baldies' who 'cry "That's a beaut!"
and chase comely ladies' and the tfdies as 'letting rip
with the most unladylike things.'
To the pleasure of all those involved ~ England received
. '
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll very we,l l and the production,
which. had been arranged by Laurence Olivier, ran many suc-cessful
weeks before being transferred to New York. But
just how important was English acceptance of The-Doll to
the Trust and to Australian drama? For years Australia had
looked to England for cultur~ guidance, but now these
"colonials" did not necessarily yearn for approval; as
Bruce Grant saids
It must have seemed like the end of a long road
••• to ali those who had sponsored The Doll from the
beginning. Yet within minutes we had agreed that
fundamentally it 4id not matter whe t her the play went
well in London or not. A failure would set the Eliza­bethan
Theatre Trust back financially; it might preju­dice
the presentation on Broadway.· But it would not
disprove anything about the play. If English audiences
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did. not like the play, so much the worse for them.
The___Australians--or a ·gopd number of them--had liked
it; ~ey had even been moved by it. The West End wa~
refined to the point of exhaustion, anyway. To hell
with i ti Back to the Gr.eat South Land where life is
raw and dramatic and sentiment8t2and where the theatre
has its great days ahead.of it. - The Australians· now had enou~h confidence to accept their
1
nativ·e wo,Jrk\ : s good. The fact that English critics and
audiences praised it only reinforced this confidence.
New York critics and audiences found The Doll harder
to_take and understand. They generally felt that the script
- ~d acting were good, as Richard Watts, Jr. of the New York
Post explained,
\
One immense virtue of the play is that it always
gives the impression of having been written out of the
author's heart and soul and because he had something
that he passionately wanted to say. There are seven
characters, and all of them seem utterly real. That
air of honesty and integrity is always1~resent, and it
gives the drama a fresh sense of life. · .
But others felt cheated, they felt tha,t ·they we~ eing
one small seamy side of Australian life through several
inarticulate people. Some, like John Chapman of the Daily
News, could not understand the dialect,
The unique tongue they speak tricked my ear last
evening and makes it difficult for me to make a lucid
and understanding report. By the time I realized that
Bonnie was not a girl bu\ a man named Barney (played
by the author) I was now trying to unravel the sounds
an Austrf!ian makes when he essays a simple word like
bastard.
The play was not a success in New- York and closed after only
twenty-nine performances. Why could American audiences not
accept it? A writer for the Reporter tried to find an
answers
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i'-.ay Lawler has written an honest~ engrossing play
about real people, and . flUCh of its interest was height­ened
by the unfamiliarity of i~s background. In trying
to disc·~er why Doll failed- here while it succeeded< in
London, the obvious explanation--and one used by many
reviewers --was that this very unfamiliarity of milieu
and accent proved obstacles to American understanding .
But I do not think this 1.s the real answer. I think
it r.1ay have _failed because Lawler, honest dramatist
though he is, was still not artist enough to make this
specin experience a universal one. For certainly
~rt is eeded to bring power .and meaning to the crude~
ness a society in whic~ a Kewpie doll ifsa symbol
of happiness as well as a thing of beauty.
Was Summer of the Seventeenth Doll simply not universal
encwgh to play well to American audiences? Perhaps so, but
a review in Commonweal compared Lawler favorably with
several important American playwrights,
His quality is seen to advantage in light of his
American peers, all of whom work a comparable vein.
He has some of liir. Arthur Miller's dogged thrust, but
a more acute ear and less doctrinaire social egotism;
he shares with Odets the pictureeque homeliness of the
actual, and some wry delight in that, and there is a
not unconsiderable affinity with Mr. Paddy Chayefsky;
similar milieux, similar closeness and wit of percep­tion,
that same hovering tenderness--though here at a
more austere removal--and altogeth~r less smartness,
17ss f~nicky clutching at tidy moralisms and thera­pies.
If Lawler could be put in the same circle as Miller, Odets,
and Chayefsky, and if his writing has continued to ,be
categorized among the best, then the real problem must have
been a cultural chasm between•America and Australia : Bruce
Grant tried to define this chasm in Adult Educations
I do not think Americans would understand the
social character of Barney and Roo ••• the dignity
which Lawler gave Barney and Roo. · It would possibly
take an historian to explain this aqequately but we can
observe the surface effects. I feel sure no American
audience would appreciate Roo's shame at being forced
to work in a factory; in addition ~is life with Barney
has a gallantry which Americans, inclined to regard
their itinerant workers as hobos evading responsibility
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# ' (such as the pursuit of success) · would not easily
understand. ,
A play which quie't f y chronicles the unheroic
thought 8.!}d gestures of men and women who have no c
intention of resigning from society, no urge to sui­cide,
no desire ~o martyr themselves for the sake of
their souls or the future of their. civilization, would
seem tame after the run-of guilt, frustration--and
great t+agedy--which Broadway had in the post-war
years. The · vigours of The Doll could not save it, 11he
r Ameriei\{1 theatre has had no lack of vigour itself.
Perhaps .Ame.zJ.cans could not ~asp the full meaning in The
j ,.
Doll because of these cultural problems, but this first
attempt at bringing it to American audiences was fortunately
not the last.
In 1968 .the Negro Ensembl..e Company in New York City was
looking for an international work to use as its second pro­duction
of its first season. They chose The Doll. Adapting
the script to suit themselves, they set the action in New
Orleans and the cane cutters became migrant farm workers.
Dialogue was appropriately altered to include American Negro
vernacular rather than the Australian, ~ut the events were
all the same. Clive Barnes of the New York Time~ound a
new universality in this approach,
·This was always a well-crafted, interesting play,
but one short of distinction in its writing, and it is
therefore no great loss when the dialogue {with I think
only minor local amendme~ts) has been adapted for an
American cast. What is interesting is how well the
play's ethos matches its new American milieu--Australia
and America have a great deal in common in their fron­tier
aspirations. But, even more, in its exploration
of the snow slopes of yesterday, the pla¥Wf~ght is
touching a humanity that is co,mmon to all.
'
It may have tak~n transpos~ng the events .and characters into
an American framework to get Americans to take notice and
see the true beauty and meaning of The Doll, but .there was
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still another way to bring it even closer ·to the American
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consciousness, albeit with a loss of original intent.
<
In 1961 United Artists released a film adaptation of
The Doll under the title "Season of Passion," Starring
Ameri.can fav.ori-tes Ernest Borgnine, Anne Baxter, Angela
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27
'Lansbury, Mills, this film came closer to bringing
to American hearts than any of the stage adap-
'
tations. Having been raised on cinema since the twenties,
audiences in America more readily accepted the story of The
. Doll when told on film, especially with the thick Australian
accents necessarily toned down to accomodate both their ears
a nd the American actors' tongues, It also had an altered
ending that was somewhat more hopeful than the play's ver­sion.
Film takes a harder look at its potential profit than
theatre, and therefore tries to be more appealing to its
audience, and that meant adapting as closely as possible to
American tastes where the film was cont erned. Newsweek
magazine said of the film,
Like the play it is based on, "Season of Passion"
is not slick, poetic, or profound; it is19though,
honest, compassionate, and enlightening. •
Hollywood had produced a film that, though somewhat watered
• down from the original, struck a chord in the hearts of
American movie-goers.
Of the many versions that have been executed of this ·
Australian classic, those that have been the most success­ful
have been adapted somewhat to the audience whil~ keeping
enough of its distinction to being some.thing new and provo­cative
to the theatre. Even today in its own country pro-
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ductions of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll require ~e
refocusing, as indicated in this excerpt from a review Clef~
a 1978 production of the play in South Australia,
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In the 5O's the play was "about mateship" and
"about the . blighted Australian myth and dream of the
individualist hero in the glorious outback." This was
deep~· Olive and probably because of the less- satis ­fying'
roadway rewrite" . suggested by John Sumner and
exec by Lawler. Now the play is being seen {for -a
change--and rightly so) ~s a piece about Olive's fierce
desire to hold a crumbling world together. Ms. Skinner
avoids the child-lover image of Olive, and Roo's insis­tence
that this is what ehe is now emerges as a limited
_ perception of the complexities of Olive's love.
The fact that the play will tolerate such a
reemphasis and retain its validity speaks volumes for
its genuine universality. But this is the point--the
universality and relevance only emerge when there is
strict and caring fidelity to those hoary28ld unities,
time, place and character through action.
The situation in The Doll, people g~ through and
beyond a relationship, is something in everyone's life. To
Australians it brought a chance to see their lives: on stage
in an internationally accepted work for the first time. To
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the rest of the world it gave a glimpse into lives which are
very distinct, Australia.t;i, and yet fundamentally the same as
anyone else's. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is and will
continue to be a landmark in international drama.
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Notes
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Seventeen
"Australian Drama Since 'Summer of the
oll, '" Meanjin, Sept. 1964, p. 229, cited by
Virginia Kirby-Smith, "The DevelQpment of Australian Theatre
and Dramas 1788-1964," Diss. Duke Univ., 1969, p. 525.
- 2 Wal Cherry, "Summer of the Seventeenth Doll," rev.
of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, by Ray Lawler, Meanjin,
Mar. 1956, P• 83.
3 Hugh Hunt, Playwrights Advisory Board Correspondence,
cited by Leslie Rees, The Making of Australian Drama
(Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1973), pp. 257-8.
4 Lindsay Browne, rev. of Summer ot- the Seventeenth
Doll, by Ray Lawler, Sydney Morning He J ald, 11 Jan. 1956,
p. 6, cited by Kirby-Smith, p. 527.
5 Ray Lawler, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (New Yorks
Random House, 1957), p. 15.
6 Ibid., pp. 139-4o.
7 Jennifer Palmer, ed., C• qntemporary Australian Play-wrights
(Adelaide, Adelaide Univ. Union Press, 1979),
p. 38.
8 Lawler, p. 126.
9 Terry Goldie, "Dolls and Homes and the Anger· of
Reality," World Li teratU:re Written in E:nglish, 19 ( 1980),
10 Ibid., pp, 210-1.
29
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11 Bruce Grant, "English Critics and The Doll"
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Mean.jin,· Sept._ 1957, pp. 295-6.
12 Ibid., P• 295.
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13 Richard Watts, Jr., '!An Honest Drama from Austra­lia,
" ~_rev. of Summer of the S_eventeenth Doll, by Ray Law~er,
t
New York Pos , 23 Jan. 1958, n. pag.; rpt. in New York
Theatre Critics' Reviews, 195~, p. 390.
14 John Chapma· n, " .'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll' Out
of .,Xhis World Linguistically," rev. of Summer of the Seven­teenth
Doll, by Ray Lawler, Daily News (New York), 23 Jan.
1958, n. pag.; rpt. in ibid.
15 Marya Mannes, Theater, "Sugar Cane and Kewpie
Dolls," rev. of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, by Ray
Lawler, Reporter, 6 Mar. 1958, p. 36.
16 Richard Hayes, The Stage, "The Disguises of Love,"
rev. of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll,, by Ray Lawler,
Commonweal, 67 (21 Feb. 1958), 54o.
17 Bruce Grant, rev. of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll,
by Ray Lawler, Adult Education, 2 (Mar. 1958), n. pag.,
cited by Rees, .p. 473.
18 Clive Barnes, Theater• "'Summer of 17th Doll' by
Negro Ensemble," rev. of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, by
Ray Lawler, New York Times, 21 Feb. 1968, p • . 59.
19 "Sleeper," rev. of "Season of Passion," dir. by
Leslie Norman, Newsweek, 8 Jan. 1962, p • • 64.
20 Guthrie Worley, "Major Play .Given in a Minor Key,"
rev. of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll ,-by Ray L~wler,
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Theatre Australia, Feb. 1979t. p. JJ.
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CHAPTER J
The Bushman and Ife'treat from Realism
I
. r ·_After' he~ mpressive Broadway run of Summer of the
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Seventeenth Doll Lawler did not return to his homeland. He
lived in Ireland and sometimes Kent with his wife and twin
children. He was riding high on a crest of popularity, both
public and critical; but as Leslie Rees said in his book
The Making of Australian Drama, his writing appetite was ;
only whetted,
The Doll continued to bring him fame and to be
produced in more and more countries, and he could pro­bably
have lived off -the returns from even modest per­formances
indefinitely. But a playwright's aim is to
write plays; with most it is a compulsion. Lawler's
particular obligation to~ himself was to write plays
that would be both import~ and popular, this being
the lead given by The Doll.
Out of this writing hunger came Law~er's next play, The Pic­cadilly
Bushman. Drawing from his own very recent experi­ences
in Australia and England, Lawler created an ' intri­guing,
albeit peculiar, character study. Critics expected
• much of this man· who had brou~ht Australian drama to the
forefront of international attention. Those who praised its
initial production found themselves eating their words after
closer scrutiny. However, its dramatic thinn~ss is compen­sated
by its insightful sociological implications. -
In The Piccadilly Bushman Lawler turned from attacking
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national myths 0£ mateship an~ the outback -to \ft~cking the
~ ~- con£licting relationship bet~en Australia and England. He
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r-examined
the sentimental attachment many Australians felt to
England as cultural and moral guide, as well as the conde-scending
atti tud_e many British had toward Australian "colo-nials."
England a
experience 6n stage as an actor, and in
expatriate playwright, gave him the rational'
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and emotional starting point for his play. The story
involves an Australian actor who has returned from England
after ten years to star in the film version of a popular
Australian novel. There are actually two story lines. The
f-irst concerns this actor, Alec Ritchie, trying to cope with
the novelist, the scriptwriter, and the director. A second
subplot concerns Alec's attempts to resolve his tempestuous
marriage to Meg. In both we see Alec disowning everything
Australian within him. All action takes place in a
fashionable home off Sydney harbor. ,
As the play opens a press ~arty for returning actor
Alec Ritchie is just finishing. His press agent and friend,
Grace Clive, indicates from the beginning bitternes£ toward
an artist who made his success in England before returning
to a land he has grown away frim,
ALEC, How did it go?
GRACE, In the words of a vernac~lar you!ve probably
forgotten--bloody bottlipg.
But Alec hardly needs reminding that- he ,is misplaced. As
his plane landed in Syd~ey he felt so terrified he could
hardly move. He wondered just how he wopld fit in a£ter
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such a long abs~nce. We see ithe real. depth of his separa-
~ tion from his homeland when he asks about Grace'~ husband
Harry, who was once his closest friend. Grace tells Alec
that Harry has been dead for three years. The· gulf is so
wide that he even forgets his closest friends. Later he
ridicules \.his Yanngoola-born··wife by reproducing her ace-ants
Well, at's how it is. 0 Yanngoolal What a name. ~t
reall needs the accent to get the full ugly flavour,
doesn't it? (He reprodu~es it with bitter accuracy.)
Meet the missus. Comes .from Yanngoola. Town's a bit
on the small side, of course, just the one street and
them flamin' great red plains, but we do all right.
- What country, y'know, and we got Quite a reputation
for breedin' bitch bound wimmen--j
Alec's roots lie deep, he c~ll mimic his native accent.
n his tirade we learn that his wife Meg was sent home a
year earlier because she could not stop having one night
stands with various "down and out" men. She and Chris, the
Ritchie's son, have been living in Yanngoola, and her
arrival in Sydney is the first meeting , the Ritchies have had
in over a year. Unknown to Meg, Alec plans to take their
small son back to England, with or without her, when the
filming is finished. .
As the first act continues, the rest of the characters
are introduced. Isabel and Lew Leggat, the wealthy couple • .
who regard England as "home" even though they are native
Australians, have loaned their home to Alec i;md Meg. They
come bustling in to rub elbows with the famous actor who is
returning home from the "mother country. :· Finally we meet
Stuart Allingham, the scriptwriter; · Douglas O'Shea,· the
novelist; an'1 Vincent Franklin, the dir~ctor. O'Shea com-
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plains that Stuart has changed his navel f,jm an honest tale
of fundamental loneliness i rf the outback to a mere adventure
yarn drained of all meaning. H€ feels a kinship to Meg as
he refers to the scripts
Have y~u read this? (Meg shakes her head without
'looking to ·see what it ·is. But even this is encow;zage­
·ment or O'Shea and he streams on like a fresh breeze.)
I tell you, a man's mad.· He makes up his mind when
he's kid that he want~ to write. The only way he '
feels he can get his hantts on the sense of his own
little hunk of the world, see. So he puts aside every­thing
that's likely to get in the way of this, and for
years he works until at last he manages to produce a
book that comes pretty close to it. You know the first
thing he does after that? He sells the film rights to
a bunch of Pommies who turn the whole thing upside down
and drain all the sense and meaning out of it again.
(He tosses 4he script o·n to the table.) A man is stark
raving madl
O'Shea counts on fellow-countryman Alec to back him up in
his protests. As the act closes, Alec has decided that he
will support O'Shea, and a meeting is called.
In the second act Alec, Grace, Vincent, and O'Shea are
waiting for Stuart to show up at the m~eting to discuss
script changes which will make it closer to the novel's ori­ginal
intent. Stuart has obviously delayed his arrival
because he is hostile to any changes made in his gcript.
Alec, Vincent, and O'Shea launch into a discussion of Aus-
• tralian culture, highlighted by Alec's playing a record he
made in England for his son dealing with aboriginal stories.
One story goes as follows,
•
In the beginning, before the fbrst'dreaJ!l time, all life
was held by the great spirit, Mywilbra, and the face of
the earth ·was empty like smoke.. Then came the first
dream time, and in her dreaming, Mywilbra moved up out
of the darkness and made all things. Mother she was to
the wide rivers and the silver fish, to the . tall trees
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and rocks ·and the quain:t little ·furr;yWanima:).s they
sheltered, and mother -to· the black men that she spread
all over the ·land. And .. when Mywilbra looked at what,.
she had done, she saw that it was a perfect pattern of
her dreaming, and she asked herself what she could do
to be sure that all things would be at the end as they
were at the making. So. this one Mywilbra, she took the
spirit of each thing she had created and tied the long­.
est hair o·t its head to the place where it belonged.
:That · s why, as every little piccaninny knows, when all
things die--no matter how far they may have wandered in
the'r ime--the spi~it i~ able to find its way back ,to
its arting place.
O'Shea finally cannot take what he feels is a parody of
na-tive Australians and he tears the needle off the record, damaging it. Despite this outburst, Vincent offers O'Shea
an advisory position with the film, and Alec persuades him
to accept. Finally Stuart arrives, he has been on a fishing
trip with the Leggats. The three men are angry with Stuart,
but the Leggats take the blame for his being late and try to
bolster his position by downgrading O'Shea and Au~tralia in
general, as follows,
ISABEL, ••• If you ask me, I
this Australian .author far
ALEC, Mrs. Leggat--
,
think you're taking
too seriously.
ISABEL, No, I mean it. After all, what's our literary
standing out here? And as Stuart said when he
· told us about it-- •
STUART, (not totally annoyed that the quip should be
aired) Isabel, this is neither the time nor the
place--
ISABEL, But, my dear, ~t's so true! He said .that this
man--what's his name--O'Shea--that he throws the
English language around as though it were a boom­erang
that he wasn't particularly .anxious to have
returned. Now isn't that true? And isn't it
typical? ••• You mustn't think that I've any~
thing against you as an author, it's just that I
never read any books written locally at all. Just
as I never listen to the voices out here if I can
help. It's ·a matter of standards really. We were
given a mother tongue, and I think those of us who
appreciate it have an obligation to keep it as
decent as possible. By reaaing decently written
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books and speaking ,it dgcently olrselves. If you
understand what I ~~an. - Hearing a discrepancy in Isabel .'s pronunciation of the words
"salt" and "bream, 11 0 'Shea turns the tables on· her a
O'SHEA, What did you say the average man was?
ISABEL, · I . said he was -supposed to be the salt of the
:· arth. ,,
O'SHEA Not according to the decent Englishman,he
i 't. At a stretch, he might be the salt of the
arth, Mrs. Le~at, but the salt--no. (Her jaw
drops a little.) Just as the first fish you
caught this morning was a bream to you, but its
soul mate was a bream to your friend.
(In these repetitions, O'SHEA contrasts the
upper-class English pronunciation of the
words with ISABEL'S ren~ition of the fairly
accepted Austral norm.)
The Leggats, especially Isabel, are embarrassed by this
attack and leave. The silence is broken by the entrance of
the servant Corcoran, who brings in a plate of cleaned bream
and uses normal Australian pronunciation to describe them.
Attention is then directed toward Stuart, who has left the
others waiting for over an hour. He is reprimanded by
Vincent. Angry when he hears that O'.Shea is being given a
position of some authority in the film, Stuart tells O'Shea
and Alec that the reason he was ~late is that Vincent told
him that the meeting was not to be taken seriously anyway,
but was only to placate O'Shel. Vincent breaks in by saying
that since Stuart is irresponsible, he decided to in fact
give the Australian novelist a real voice in the filming.
O'Shea watches the bickering for a ·while, then tells a long
story which parallels ~lee's recording of an aboriginal
myth, but in terms of British and colon..i al history. It goes
as follows,
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In the beginning, they ,say, before t first dream
time, way up in the No~ h Sea there was this young
white witch very virginal ahd remote. Wrapped around
with mist and very, very inscrutable. Then came the
dream time, and in her dreaming she broke through the
veil that held her and. set out to create -a world for
herself. The only thing she had to help ~er was a
certain magic. Nothing 'black or nasty, you know, she
-wouldn't put herself under any obligation. It was
.more ike - -card tricks 'than anything else. Yeh, tfiat
was i She was the gr~atest somnambulistic card
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-plaier of her day. No stakes were too high, bluff was
too olg. So pretty soo she started to collect her
world. Not all at once : it wasn't easy, there were
other players in the dr.eam almost as good as she was.
But an island here, a continent there, a desert in the
sun, a patch in the shade--gradually it all mounted up.
I might mention that in the process of all this she'd
rather lost that remote virginal look, and standing at
the back of her chair, watching her shuffle the cards,
were some of the most illegitimate looking kids you
ever saw in your life. But that was all right too, she
had a use even for these, ·and one by one she packed
them off to take possession of her winnings. Some went
with shiny faces, thinking they were being rewarded,
others with a hangdog look, knowing it was likely to be
hell. But all of them had one thing in common, a lo~
long string that stretched all the way back to Mothers
diamond-studded apron. Well cards went down -and time
went on, and in far away places, the kids put her pic­ture
under their pillow and dreamed nostaligically of
home. Until at last came the day, when the pattern of
the world she had set out to create for herself was
complete. There it was, ever P>esent und~r the sun;
and at the sight of it, she became aware for the first
time of how tired she was. "Play a few games without
me," she told the boys in the back room. "I want to
spend some time with the kids. " And oddly enough, when
she sat down to think about it, that's exactly what she
did want to do. So out went the invitations to a Great ·
Big Home to Mother Week, and back they came from every
point of the compass, tit'mbling over one anothe-r with
excitement. Very amusing it was to see them with their
rough hands and rusty manners, wearing the wrong sort
of clothes, and crowding around to stare at her with
all the old adoration. Sitting that night at the head
of the magnificent family dinner she had arranged for
them she watched them fumbling their way among the
golden cutlery and felt patronising_ly fond of them. A
little contemptuoμs too, perhaps, but quite fond. On
an impulse she rose to her fee·t, intending to ·deliver
an address of welcome, and it was only then that she
realised, looking down on them, t lfat there wasn't one
of them who wasn't busting out of the apron· strings
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that· she had so carefully attached t them. Immedi­ately
everything that . lmd seemed strange and amusing
about them a minute ago now became intolerable, and
without hesitation, instead of the speech of welcome~
she lashed out at them with all the icy bitchiness she
could muster. Individually she told them every shame­ful
detail of their bir_-tp, collectively she· informed
them of how second rate ·they had become since leaving
.her presenqe. And then, in the full grossness of her
_'anci~nt breeding, she walked out on them. U~ortun­ately,
however, she hadn't counted on one thing. So
io h d it been since they parted from her that only
one them, the youngesrt of the family, had under-stood
a single word she ' said. With the result that no
sooner had the double door closed behind her than a
great buzz arose as they congratulated themselves.
"What a speech of welcome," they cried. "How well
Mamma said we were, how well born and how handsome."
Till a small voice from the far erid of the table spoke
up and said, "That's what you bastards think." And in
the silence that followed, you could hear a number of
little sounds that could have been the b~aking of
hearts or the snapping of ·apron strings.
O'Shea says he hopes his story will "get everyone straight
about their native fables." His white witch of the north,
which is a counterpart of Alec's Mywilbra, is Eng~and.
The illegitimate children sent all over the world are the
I colonies. The three men sit through this long-winded
speech, but their reactions are very different. Stuart
admires it, Vincent puts up with it because he expected it
of a colonial, but Alec is infuriated by it. He decides to
break off all ties with O'Shea, asking Vincent to back off
•
from his offer to make O'Shea consultant. The three men
leave with the resolve that O'Shea is to have no voice in
the film·. Meg, feeling that O'Shea is crushed by the rejec­tion,
eq>lains to him why she had affairs with so many men
in England1
That first one? He was the first . y'know--of, a long
time. Three or four months at lea~t. After that they
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spot t~em, you see_, a .mJ.le off. You called · 'em guests
at _ a witch's party, but-· i can get closer than that.
You lnow .what they are really? Chickens come to roo8t •
All their little lives they've heard stories of this
high and mighty roost, and eventually they've ha4 to
make the long trip back to see if they can't fly up
there and crow their heart out. And some of them
actually make it. Alec, for instance. He crows with
-~he best of them. But ·for every one that's accept~d
-up o the perch, there's a thousand scratching around
at the ottom of it. They'll never be part of the
priz-e lock, but they 're all too blind or proud or '
silly to know it, ands ewhere--hemmed in among that
mob--that's where you'll find me. Close . to some very
funny neighbours sometimes. Oh, very funny. There
was this American writer, lived in a four-hundred-year­old
house, and never wrote anything that came later
than sixteen hundred, he explained it to me once.
"What you get up to isn't love," he said, "it's a hud­dling
together of the rejected." I wonder what Alec
would think of that? N·ot viciousness, love, I wasn't
picking up misfits for the hell of9it, it was just a-­huddling
together of the rejected·.
Meg offers herself to O'Shea because she thinks he is one of
the rejected, but he refuses to be considered a misfit and
tells .her that she need not feel she is one either.
In the third act Alec and Grace ar, e waiting for Meg and
O'Shea to come home. It is later the same evening and they
have been gone all day. Alec assumes t ey are off making
love. W~ile they wait, Stuart comes in to tell Alec that he
and Vincent have decided to let O Shea help rework the
script after all. Their acc~tance of O'Shea, and thus of
Australia on its terms, disturbs Alec even more. When Meg
and O'Shea arrive with aboriginal artifacts for the
Ritchie's s~n, Alec and Grace confront them. Grace says she
is going to act as witness to Meg's aduitery so that Alec
r,
can get custody of Chris and take him back to England.
- Grace has blamed Meg for not telling Alec about ~arry's
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death, and she is paying her But Meg tells her the
truths . :,.
All this ·arternoon I have been under wide skies with
strong sunlight and shlll,l> rocks. I'm not going to have
any fuzzy outlines now. (to ALEC) It is true that
since I saw you this moP»ing, I have made a pass at
this gentl~man, but this~-(Her repetition of the term
~akes two tender words ·of it.)--gentle man turned me
down=t. That clears '-my conscience. Now I'm goihg
to cle yours. (to GRACE) We were living outside
Str d when we got the cable about Harry's death.'
Alec was rehearsing at ~e time. I rang the theatre
and on about the third try I got through to him. I
read him the cable, there was a pause, then he said
"Blast." Then another pause and he said, "Well, what
_ do you expect me to do about it?" and he hung up the
phone. So I cabled flowers from the two of us and sent
the message you got. Three or four weeks later, you
wrote an acknowledgement. It arrived when we were at
breakfast. Alec had the day off, and it was rather
late in the morning. I passed your letter across to
him, he looked at the handwriting, turned to the last
page to see the signature, then folded the letter and
pushed it back across the table to me. He didn't read
it then or at any other time. Or f5fer to it again in
any way. And that is God's truth.
Grace realizes her mistake in trusting Alec. She and her
husband were part of a past he tried to, forget. Feeling
betrayed and bitter, she slaps him hard across the face and
walks out. Alec then turns to~ and O'Shea and explains
why he did what he did1
I loathe and detest this country with everything that's
in me. How many different ways would you like to hear
me say it? I never belo;iged here. This is the prison
in which I spent my first twenty-four years--the sunlit
ro~k OY½_fhich I sweated until at last I found a way of
escape.
That way of escape was through Me_g, for in marrying her h~
got a trip t"o England from her father as a dowry. He used
, her to get to B·ngland, . and then found he' could never really
fit in there, like the children in O'S11._ea's white witch
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story. · After Alec leaves, Meg admi.· to O''Shea that she
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felt th~ s,ame way her husband : did about Australia and Eng-.. -
land, or thought she did, but because she was not strong
enough to try to adapt like ·~~m, she classed herself as a
fail~e and started clinging to other rejects and failures
for
. "
She says to O'Sheas
You~ w why I went down .the gutter in London? Beca'u se
in my heart I was certai that all the changes Alec was
making in himself were right. Even though I hated
them, I had enough of t~e poison in me to be1ieve in
what he was doing. But! couldn't match him in it, so
- I tossed myself in with what I thought were the other
failures. Failures. My Godl I had the biggest one of
~he1~ot in my arms all tne time and I didn't even know
l. t.
After clinging to failures for comfort for years, Meg real­izes
with O'Shea's help that she is married to one who needs
her help. Negative as it seems, Meg and Alec appear in the
end of the play to have a chance at their marriage because
Meg sees that he needs her.
In The Piccadilly Bushman Lawler ~ain uses his char­acters
to depict stereotypes. The difference is that in The
Doll he shows characters he had observed from the outside,
in The Piccadilly Bushman he shows characters drawh from his
own experience in the theatre. Expatriate actor Alec
• Ritchie is like many artists from Australia at the time,
especially actors and playwrights, who gained no home recog­nition
until they had made a success abroad. This success·,
elusive as it is, comes at a price; as 'Alec says to Mega
, Three generationst And how many of the hundreds of
generations that went to the making of me do you think
were born over there? Do you imagine all those centur­ies
viving can be lost and forgo~ten in three short .
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gener·ations? (She crumples dclm to a seat, her head
turned away from him, a:rld. he moves in for the kill.)
You don't have to hide your face from me, I'm no
special--freak. There are .plenty of my sort out here,
the throwbacks. But mos:t of them manage to make an
adjustment. Most of them. The rest of us fight tooth
and nail for the happy ohance of becoming an expatri­ate.
Do you know what that means? Expatriate--the man
who can ·never accept his own country, and finds that
the c]itry he hankers after never accepts himl If· you
ever w t reveng~ for the. fact that I married1~ou as I
did, o don't have to go past that one wordl '
4
As an expatriate, Alec has tried to suppress everything Aus-tralian
within him and out of this has come frustration and
dislllusionment. Finally realizing he has no place to
belong, he becomes a fit companion for Meg, who has loved
him and tried to a point to go along with his Anglophile
obssession. Meg is content being a normal Australian woman
raising her child in Yanngoola; it is Alec who longs for a
life he cannot have.
Vincent, the film's director, is a typical "Pommy" who
looks down on Australia as being hopeloosly "colonial,"
though he would not openly admit it. Stuart betrays a con­fidence
by exposing Vincent's true attitudes
I was in the head office when he insisted on the entire
film unit bei~ sent out from England. I'd never feel
easy working with Colonials, he said. When it comes to
the point, there's something1ijo awfully second-rate
about even the best of tiem. ·
Vincent's condescending outlook on Australians is contrasted
by the no less downgrading idealism' Stuart shows; as O'Shea
points outs
Serious? rGod Almighty, that's the whole point, he's
starry eyed. (He waves the sc·ript.) There's not a
person in this who's under ten feet tall, and that
includes the women, and they all walk around wearing
great big hats and stiff upper lips, and shooting from
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the hip. Even the kang¥oos
44
. · 15 e bloody man ·eaters.
In Stuart and Jincent we have two extreme ·British attitude's
toward Australia. In Lew an~ Isabel Leggat we see an Aus-
--~. tralian attitude toward England.
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The Leggats · refer to England as home even though they
\,.
are from pioneer Australian stock. Their tena- ,
'--­cious
clinging to England as t he "mother land" and their
rejection of anything Australian within them and around them
pra.Yides some of the lighter comic moments of the play, as
in the following exchange,
ISABELa (dangerously) Are you suggesting that I have
0 an Australian accent? .
O'SHEAa Hasn't anyone ever told you?
ISABEL I They have not I On the other hand, I 've been
mistaken as English repeatedly all over the world.
O'SHEA, Places like Chicago and C8.f8blanca maybe?
ISABELa No. In places that count.
Infuriated when even Stuart, after all the kindness she has
shown him, admits that she does have a ,s light accent, Isabel
is completely humiliated and turns on her husbands
LEW1 Belle, I won't have any interference.
ISABEL, (stamping her foot) My name is Isabell
LEW, (less forcefully) I know. But I--I'm upset.
ISAB&i1 So am I. Sick to death of these flashbacks of
yours to the smelting works at B.H.P. My house-­Belle--
is it any wonder that people criticize our
accents? •
LEW1 That was my fault, I suppose?
ISABELa (in swift attack) I am judged by association.
As I have been socially for years, from here to-­garden
parties at Cambridge.
LEW1 Oh, no--
ISABEL, You may very well say oh no.
LEW, Tnat lousy, rainy garden party.
ISABEL I Call it whatever you like. , But just remember
it wai:in't until you opene~ your mouth that anyone
there mentioned kookaburras. .
LEW, All rightl (generally, with.great distinctness)
I'm sorry. I apologize for my manners, . my accent, .
that I happen to own this house·, and that I'm
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unf'ortunate enough to~~ in 17 But at least,
that' ~ some thing I can re!Dledy.
_45
Isabel cannot stand the feeling ·that she is being laughed at
by friends in England, or that her husband is offending
their _British guests now with his accent or by his referring
..
to the hou they have loaned the Ritchies as his house.
ogizes to Stuart ~or the good time they had
I
while fishings
ISABELa Goodness, you've no idea how sorry we are
- about that nasty little scene. It was our fault,
you know--oh yes, it wast Lew and I have talked
it over, and he's agreed that from now on there
are to be no more fishing trips while we're enter­taining
overseas guests.
STUART I Really?
ALECa I think that's rather a mistake.
ISABELa (definitely) Oh, no. It creates quite the
wrong sort of atmosphere, you see. Particularly
for Lew. He goes racketing around out there and
then comes in full of excitement and sea air and
behaves like--Well, you saw for yourself.
STUARTa (restrainedly) Isabel, would it make ·any dif­ference
at all if r were to tell you that it's a
long time since I've admired anyone as much as I
did you two this morning wherf those damned sharks
arrived? The fact that you didn't turn a hair
when the first one tore the catch almost out of
your hand as you reeled it in, and the way Lew
leant over and smacked that other great brute as
_it bumped itself against the launch?
ISABELa (triumphantlf) But that's what I mea.tl. Smack­ing
sharkst Don t you see? It's--It's overdonet
I told him. Stream fishing is what you people are
used to, that has s~yle and some form to it.18What
we get up to is just open water larrikinism.
She cannot even accept a compliment from an Englishman on
any aspect of her Australian life. She is content to live ·
her life in Australia with some concessions, such as going
, fishing with he'i:' husband in the ope.n sea and fighting off
sharks, as long as no English see her doing it. These
rather comic examples show the pathetic relationship some
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{ Australians have to England whe they do not accept their
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own country and its uniqueness, but try to copy the land 8'f
their ancestors.
In each of these characters Lawler has illustrated and
to some degree attacked an afU)ect of Australian society and
\.
culture, er from within or without. But in the char-acter
of O'Shea, the rugged b~sh novelist, he attacks no
one, but makes us see where the compromise lies. In the
final scene he comforts Meg by referring back to Alec's
record about aboriginal mythology. Before he poked fun at
it, now he is being sincere and insightful1
Well, there it is. (broodingly) Bloody old Mywilbra,
she's the one. She takes the longest hair of the
spirit and ties it to the place where it belongs. Only
sometimes she goes past where she should and hitches it
way back on to--I dunno--some race memory, I suppose.
And then you've got yourself a real full blooded mis-fit.~
. .
He brings together the two cultures, w,h ite and black, old
world· and new, when he explains Alec's hankering after Eng-land
by using the old black legends1 he is tied to a race
memory, a tie that takes him all the way back through the
generations to the land of his fathers. In the final lines
O'Shea goes on to tell Meg1 •
What do you want me to say? That it's all a matter of
time? That there'll come a day out here when we'll
stop looking back over our shoulder and , accept what's
under our feet? ••• She'a a heartbreaking country,.
Meggie. I don't think she ever offered much in the way
of easy comfort. (Something in the abject lines of her
body touches him. He picks up an opject from among the
aboriginal pieces . and brings it to her.) (with rough
jocular tenderness) Here--a message stick. !~'s sup­posed
to keep you safe in strange ,:territory.
Here finally Lawler shows us the ideal Australian, the one
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47
1 the resentment and mis-
'f understandings, culturally bound both to England and to the
new land. In O'Shea they ar~ symbolically united, old and
--._ new, by his use of the messag~ stick.
I -
~awler "fir.st offered Th~ Piccadilly Bushman to the
en they turned it down theatrical entrepreneur
'
J. c. Williamson snatched it ,.up and gave it its initial run - with a lavish premiere on 21 November 1959. This elaborate
pr~duction dazzled many critics into thinking it was a bet­ter
play than it really was. The Times correspondent in
Melbourne wrote,
Theatre critics here ·to-day praised a new play by
Mr. Ray Lawler, author of Summer of the Seventeenth
Doll, which had its first performance last night. The
new play, The Piccadilly Bushman, is due to be produced
in Britain later. It was directed here by Australian­born
actor Mr. John McCallum. It deals with an Austra­lian
film actor who returns home after achieving .=.
success ihBritain with the belief that "colonials" are
inferior.
I
The auccess of the premiere resulted partly from a spectacu-lar
set which included a cyclorama of Sydney harbor complete
with its coat-hanger bridge in the background. Lindsay
•
Browne called it "Australia's first thoroughly stageworthy
play of ideas."22 But everyone agreed that it just had too •
many ideas, Lawler was trying to say too much, and he did
not say any of it very well. The story itself, ending with
desperation as it does, is also riot easy for an audience to
take. O'Shea, acting here as raisonneu~, says Australia
' offers little ~c omfort for its people, Leslie Rees followed
up this line by sayings
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As the play ends, on~ is forced to add, "Nor does ·
the author offer much i ?J, 1he way of easy entertainment
or ~o!lclusion." This is· a play of disquisition and a
muddled ope. It is as though Lawler said, "Last time- I
wrote about people I'd observed, people trying to work
out their destiny through physical behaviour, even
fisticuffs. Well, this time I'll write aoout the sort
of person I am myself, e'S}>ecially since I lived in Eng­land.
And .it won't be about physical matters, but
about the stresses of buj.lding up life and a career .in
anoth~country, even when you're successful to begin
with. nd I'll show how ·for the Australian artist in
part ar, a man is alw~s torn between Australia, '
which feeds his sense of ~:'belonging, and Europe, where
the contemporary life is real an~3glamorous but isn't
really part of him, or he of it.
Th&&e ideas had been developed before in Australian novels,
but The Piccadilly Bushman is the first major stage play to
involve them. It is a negative theme and not appealing to
most audiences. Only intellectuals are lik~ly to understand
and empathize with it, because they are living it. The main
character, Alec, is believable enough, but he has no redeem­ing
qualities to balance his anti-Australian feelings or the
fact that he used his wife as a steppillfo stone to England.
Wal Cherry criticized all the characters·1
The weakness of the play lies in the well-founded
Australian phrase--'we couldn't care less.' If a play
sets .out to deal with national generalisations, its
characters must be representative and its impact must
depend on our recognition of the characters and their
behaviour. The Englishmen in this play are neither
good generalisations nor , finely observed individuals.
They are stock. The Australians iμ-e, without excep­tion.,
a hopelessly rarefied specfes. We appreciate,
therefore, the qualities of the author's work, which
are numerous, but we cannot appreciate wha~ all the
fuss is about. Lawler never .made up his mind whethez4
he was ~iting about countrie~ or individual people.
The characters ,...,i n The Piccadilly Bushman . are too specialized
for any general audience to accept ·them or their problems.
Most Australians did not care about the issues the play
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raised, and even fewer non-Atlstralians fo~nd them interest-
" -: ing • .,.
Lawler's ·next important -wo~k, The Unshaven Cheek, was
never produced in Australia. · It was seen only once, at the
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Edinburgh Festival in 1963. Lawler himself withdrew it, and
copie's of
public.
script have never been made available. to the
iting this play;Lawler apparently was moving
(
away 'from realism. Critic~ cpmpared The Unshaven Cheek to
an Arthur Miller play with its use of space setting and var­iea
time frame. Thematically, Lawler reminded the audience
of values an industrial society may often forget. This he
did through the person of a cooper, or maker of barrels.
This cooper told a young visitor about his craft and his
past experiences, seen in a series of flashbacks by the
audience. As T. C. Worsley wrote in the New York Times,
this 6pened the young man's eyes,
But hearing the old man's aceounts of his trade
_and his union battles, the young man becomes fired by
his ideas, and has the wits to perceive that though the
particular satisfaction the old craftsman got from his
work may now be irrecoverable, the attitude that pro-25 duced this satisfaction can and must be rediscovered.
This idea may be intriguing, but unfortunately thi plot was
contrived, as Worsley went on to say, • .
The play has large and obvious flaws--in particu­lar,
the middle act is conducted in a series of long
realistic flashbacks that do not at all. 2gme off,
either in the writing or the production.
Lawler obviously shared the same impression this critic had.
The Unshaven Cheek has not been heard from since its one
short run.
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Lawler's attempt at Mi]tler's style did. not s~cceed the
. ~
~ first time~ but nine years lat er he retreated even farthe ¾..
from realism in his The Man wno Shot the Albatross, and pro­duced
his most important work.after The Doll. Lawler even
flew home from Ireland to Melbourne to attend the premiere
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of this pla by the Melbourne .Theatre Company. He took as
his m~in cliaracter Captain Wi~liam Bligh of the Bounty, ,.
later a governor of New South Wales. Mary Lord described
the- productions As the title suggests, the play explores the
effects of the mutiny on Bligh's personality when he is
once again in a position of considerable authority over
, a faction-ridden community. Lawler here abandons the
conventional realistic setting for a skeletal arrange­ment
of rostrums on several levels, which allows great
fluidity in the action. The play moves backwards and
forwards through a number of scenes both present and
past and in and out of Bligh's mind which is haunted by
memories of the mutiny and fantasies surrounding it.
This is a play of considerable power and psychological
penetration, factually accurate, exploring but .not
r 7solvi~7one of Australia's most enigmatic historical
figures. ,
~
Superb acting combined with Lawler's _masterful ability to
write authentic dialogue made The Man Who Shot the Albatross
the playwright's second greatest success. It play~d also in
Canberra, was revised in Ireland, and was later presented in
Sydney and at the Adelaide Fe«tival in 1972.
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Notes
1 Rees, The Making of Australian Drama (Sydney,
Angus· and.Ji ertson, 1973), p. 290.
I 2 Ray Lawler, The Picoadilly Bushman (London, Angus
and Robertson, 1961), p. 9.
- 3 Ibid. , p. 21 •
4 Ibid., JJ-4. PP•
5 Ibid., PP• 61-2.
6 Ibid., PP• 69-70.
7 Ibid., P• 70.
8 Ibid., pp. 79-81.
9 Ibid., P• 85.
10 Ibid., P• 102. I
11 Ibid., p. 104.
12 Ibid., P• 107.
13 Ibid., P• 105.
14 Ibid., pp. 77-8.
15 Ibid., PP• 38-9.
16 Ibid., 70. P•
17 Ibid., PP• 7J-4.
18 Ibid·., pp. 94-5.
19 Ibid.,.,...,p. 107 • .
20 Ibid., pp. 108-9.
21 Rev. of The Piccadilly Bushman, by Ray Lawler,
51
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52
Times (London), 14 Sept ~. 1~~. p. 5.
22 .Li'ndsay Browne, "To Slum or Not to Slum," in Aust?"B.­lian
Theatre Year 1959-60 (Sydney, n.p., 1960), p. 51.
2J Rees, p. 297.
~4 Wal Cherry 1 "The Picc.adilly Bushman and Prisoner: s
Country," re s. of The Piccadilly Bushman, by Ray Lawler, ,
• l
and Prisoner's Country, by V ce Palmer, Meanjin, Mar. 1960,
P• 93°
_ 25 T. C. Worsley, "Lawler' s 'Unshaven Cheek' Staged at
Edinburgh 1 " rev. of The Unshaven Cheek I by Ray Lawler,
New York Times, 20 Aug. 196)~ p. J8.
26 Ibid.
27 Mary Lord, "Lawler, Ray(mond Evenor)," in Contempor­ary
Dramatists, ed. James Vinson (New Yorks St. Martin's
Press, 1977), pp. 468-9.
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CHA.P.T.E R 4
The Trilogy
Wher'ea Ray Lawler had b, en retreating farther and far­ther
away from realism sinc·e Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
and The Piccadilly Bushman with The Unshaven Cheek and The - Man Who Shot the Albatross, in 1975 he stepped back into
that mode and back to the characters of The Doll. He
decided to make The Doll third in a set of plays he called
The Doll Trilogy, and so he went back to write the first and
~
second of the series. He explained why h~ chose to go back-wards
in times
There were probably a couple of reasons, one was
that I left Australia in 1957 and 1I was away just on
twenty years. I am a grass roots writer and what hap­pened
in the time I was away was that gradually I lost
touch with Australia and the type of Australian I knew
and it was quite impossible for me to write a play
about modern Australia, so I was in rather a cleft
stick I suppose, because I didn't feel I could write
about the countries I was living in. I was enjoying it
but I didn't ever feel that I was part of the scene
there, and when I was looking for things to write about
Australia I realised I weuld have to project b~ckwards
if I was going to write about what I knew and this
would be one of tht things I suppose in setting the
trilogy backwards.
And so Lawler turned to the recent past because that was the
Australia he . knew. But why did he choose to add to a play
he had written over twenty years ea_rlier? It was dangerous
to do anything with a work that had achi eved a revered posi­tion
in Australian dramatic circles and was to most of the
53
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54
{ the world the only Austr~ t~p play it had ever seen or read.
~ Many feilow playwrights had attempted to copy its style af\d
pattern, ~ith almost universal failure. Unti~ now Lawler
had refused to imitate himsel~. But these were his char­acter.
a, and he felt there was something more for them t ~
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say, J
So
When The Doll came -bn and ran for a time people
were asking all sorts ·o:f questions such as "well now
it's 1953 and they've been going for seventeen years-­what
happened to them during the war," for instance,
- which I had rationalised in my mind to a certain
extent, I knew but I didn't think anybody would ask the
qu~, and I thought "oh yes, I see that" and then
people would ask "what ~o the dolls mean?" and so on,
and in the end there were so many bits and pieces that
I felt I hadn't got quite -enough about the characters
or perhaps that I hadn't handled them sufficiently well
in The Doll that I needed to say something more. Nancy
for instance, was a character that everybody used to ,
ask about because they talk about Nancy in The Doll ~
over and over until people are either fed up with he
or they wanted to know more about her, and to me the
writing of the other two plays was well wor~h while
merely :for creating the c:~ acter of Nancy • .
he chose again to speak through Roo : Barney, Olive, Emma ,
Bubba, and now Nancy, and he was also going back to a time
he could remember, the time of his childhood. He also chose
to take these people back in time because he could' not see
any real future in their lives after 1955; as he explained,
• I don't think there is any future for those people
after the break-up in The· Doll. They really had
reached the end of the line and this is one of 'the rea­sons
why I have never seen the film that was made of
the play because I believe there was a possibility
there of a happy ending and I .can't see any chance of a
happy ending for them whatsoeve-r, 'and to have gone on
and -to follow them into disillusionment I don't know
that it would have interest~~ me very much. I would
have had to split up very deffnitely the areas to -fol­low
Roo and Barney and I always fel.t that Roo and Bar­ney
would drift apart eventually because the thing that
had held them together to some extent was the relation-
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ship ·down in Melbou1re, ·and Barn~y had reacl'\ed a stage
in his life when he was~taking a different track. Roo,
I should imagine would b~ a much more bitter man thal).
he was so there's no real future in that. I wasn't
interested in seeing Olive .withering with Emma sitting
by moaning, and I felt ,there was sufficient said at the
end of The Doll for anyqqdy to visualize what happened
to the people and in the · idea of taking it backwards I
thought· I'd. left a number of things unexplained and
~exp ored and f~r this 'reason it was worth while
going ckwards.
the first of the ~' rilogy, premiered as a
separate work in 1975. Kid. stakesa promises made without
anl.real lasting committment, made for the fun of the
moment, this was what Lawler wanted to show. It is in this
~
play that we see Olive, who is ready for marriage, take the
lay-off instead.
Kid Stakes introduces us to the characters of The Doll
Trilogy in the first year of their seventeen year relation­ship.
The play has a young, carefree mood and let~ us see
the roots of many events that are referred to in The Doll. ,
In the first act Roo and Barney settle for the summer of
1937 in Emma Leech's boardinghouse, after having met Olive
and Nancy at the Aquarium, where Nancy made the crack about
the men being two fish out of water, a crack that Emma
remembers and throws back in Roo's face seventeen years •
later, when the fun is disappearing. We see the seeds of
Olive's fierce attachment to the lay-off sea~on when, after
a day of fun at Luna Park and a moonlight swim (good times·
Pearl cannot appreciate in The Doll) she tells Nancy that
she is ready to give up her respect.able position at the mil­linery
to be a barmaid so she can spend· more time with Roo,
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a decision in which Nanci eventually -follo~s. R~o gives
( . ~
Olive a .doi1, one they got from Luna Park that day, not
knowing that it will become to her an all-important symbol
of their love. As he explai~~ to her how he has just become
ganger, or team -?rganizer, he also tries to tenderly make as
-.
much of a bmnmittment to her as he can. She can go ahead
and quit he' job at the millirtery, he says, and he will sup­port
her until April. She refuses, and when he presses her,
Roo goes on in a show of affection that almost transcends
his inarticulateness•
R001 Ah, now •••• (rising) What brought that up?
OLIVE1 Barney's attitude, for a start. (Breath quick­ening)
Anyone can see · that he's already gone a
long way more than holdin' hands and moonlight
swims.
R001 Talk. He likes to skite--
OLIVE1 No, Nancy told me. It's the full routine.
R001 Well, if it is, that's up to them. Different
matter, with a kid like you.
OLIVE1 A kid?
R001 Well, you haven't knocked around like Nancy, have
you? ,
OLIVE1 What you mean is I'm a virgin?
R001 What I mean is that we got some money in the
kitty, and I'm offerin' you and Nance ·a fair
share, So the four of us, we can enjoy ourselves
without you bein' worried over jobs and work,
.Ain't no strings to it where you're concerned, and
no conditions-- •
OLIVE1 (stung) I'm so much of a kid, the thought of
sleepin' with me wouldn't cross your mind, I
s'pose? •
R001 (roused) Now, don't you get me ho~pin' mad. It's
on my mind like nothin' else. I lie awake at
night up there and think how it would be, the two
of us together, till I get so that 'I'm nearly
crazy. But until we know what we're about, I'm ·
pr~pared to settle for just holdin' hands and
moonlight swims. Havin' you around so that I got
the--(groping for words and stumbling on a true
., but Uijaccustomed phrase) -pleasure of" your com-pany.
-
As the act ends Olive leads Roo out the back verandah and
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• < .1 57
Emma comes downstairs anj puts the doll iri a vas~. The
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basis for Olive's and Roo's relationship has been laid.
The second act is devoted to developing the relation­ship
between Barney and Nanc.y... In th~ first scene we get a
hint ~hat Barney_ has unfini~hed business in his home towt1- of .
Makarandi, ut any unpleasantness is suppressed by the fran-tic
ions the four are making to attend a party at
4
the Morrises, cousins of Nancy's whose names pop up later
in The Doll as a source of contention. Olive is stung to - discover that Emma has given Bubba, a small child next door,
the kewpie doll. Only after. Roo and Barney rush out and
buy Bubba candy walking sticks to coax the doll away from
her will Olive relax enough to leave for the party.
In the second scene conflict arises when Emma returns
home from a visit with two women from Barney's past. Having
found a letter he left out downstairs, she learned of a
rendezvous he was to have. Realizing ~e was not going to go
down to the post office to meet them, Emma went· herself and
met the two mothers of Barney's two i llegitimate sons.
Armed with unpleasant news, Emma returns to find a celebra­tion
in progress,
w
BARNEY1 Seems to me you're enjoying yourself a bit too
much, son.
(NANCY switches her attention back to BARNEY,
and although he still rejects · her advances,
it is clear that h~ is now relishing the
situation. NANCY f~nishes the dance with a
final bump and grind, and holds the discarded
kimono away from her to reveal her underwear
, clad figure • ) ·
NANCY, Chase me, boys. I'm full of chocolates ••••
(She tosses the kimono at BARNEY, and challenges,)
Last one up the stairs has to pull the .blinds
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down. • • •
(She starts to•ards the archway, BARNEY after
her. He swings. her over his shoulder in a .
fireman's lift, and charges onwards to come
face to face with EMMA, standing in the hall­way.
She is qressed in street clothes, and
has made a quiet but determined entrance from
the direction of the kitchen during the last
lines of the foregoing dialogue. BARNEY
stops short, O:tIVB ceases to play, and the·
action halts abruptly. NANCY then slides to
the floor, trying to cover herself.)
EMMA, drawing breath) Well ... it's what I might
have expected, I s. 'pose.
OLIVE, (removing her cigarette) Oh, now-­ROO,
(rising) Not what y.ou think.
OLIVE1 If you'd come in two minutes ago, you woulda
~ found us havin' a Bible session.
EMMA1 And two minutes later, it woulda been an orgy.5
Open talk of sex like this would have closed down The Doll
in 1955, but in 1975 it was expected. Emma has not brought
the women with her or told them where Barney is, but she
b"luntly and cruelly tells Nancy about Barney's "mistakes."
'$.
Nancy is unexpectedly amused by the whole situations
BARNEY1 Well, they're the ones that's gotta chew it
over, ain't they? Which of taem I ought to marry?
~ANCY1 Reckon if there's any doubt that they can work
it out in order of priority. First come, first
served--if you '11 pard'on the expression--
BARNEY, Whose side are · you on?
NANCY1 Me? I'm just a girl at the end of the queue.
But I can tell who's at the head of it. ~hichever
one of those two has got the eldest child.
BARNEY1 That's Norma.
NANCY, No dispute then, is there? Norma's got first
preference, •
BARNEY, No, she ain't. Because it's May I was engaged
to at the time ••••
NANCY I Engaged? .
BARNEY, While this was goin' on. And May says an
engagement gives her every claim to being first,
officially. · .
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Barney echoes Nancy's phrase "first come ; first served"
seventeen years later in explaining h1s past actions to -
Pearl. Nancy defends Barney, who has been drinking all day
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~ to forg~t his trouble an f.isally passes out. At Emma's
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insistence, Nancy takes money out of his belt to pay off ~is
monthly support debt, knowing now that she can_ never have
marriage out of Barney. After Emma leaves to deliver the
payment, Nancy pours whiskey.over Barney's body, waking him
from :tiis Seeing that ' someone has taken money out, of
his belt, Barney complains,
BARNEY, Hey--1 been got at.
NANCY1 (with dry bitterness) ,h, no. No. Everybody
- else, maybe, but not you.
Olive reacts with what at first seem like sobs. Nancy and
Roo are concerned, but when Olive turns and they see her
laughter, they all join in her mirth.
The third act sets things up for a continuation of the
lay-off. Roo and Barney give Emma a refrigerator to insure
her allegience to them, but she views it with forbodinga
EMMA, I'm pleased with what I oughta be. Chocolates
or a box of hankies, that's the sort of thing you
get from proper boarders.
(She locks the piano.)
My mistake, of course, was letting Barney stay on
here. Once I knew about him. Made it look as
though I didn't care that him and Nance was on
together. Well, I do. •
(She takes the key back to the sideboard
drawer and then, changing her mind, slips it
into her pinn~ pocket.)
And you needn't think, fridges and the like, that
I'll stand by and watch you make a fool of Olive.
ROO1 You're all over the flamin' place--what's it got
to do with Olive? Givin' you a fridge?
EMMA I Two words. Other times. A f§idge, you said, ·
will come in handy other , tim~s. ..
Emma knows that this gift means that the~ will re~urn, that
there will be other times. But she does not look a gift
horse in the mouth. Her common sense forces her . to keep
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such a practical gift in spit~ - of her feeling.
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In the second scene of tli'is final act we see Olive pre­paring
for a dance with her former admirer Dickie Pouncett,
recalling Bubba 's preparation .. ·for a New Year's Eve party in
The Doll. She had promised Dickie months earlier that &he
\.
he annual staff dance with him, and Roo con- , ;
I cedes ·that she should keep ~er word. After she leaves with
Dickie, Roo and Barney quicklY. gather their things for a
has"ty departure. Roo realizes that he cannot give Olive
what she really wants. He wants to release her to someone
like Dickie, a promising advertiser who can offer Olfve a
happy and conventional life. But Olive suspects that some­thing
is afoot and she returns within minutes, discovering
the ruse. Emma tries to talk Olive into getting back in the
car with Dickie, but she tells her mothers
Dickie and me'll never get back to, where we were,
because I'm not the yo~ miss that I used to be. The
word is spoilt, Mum--you re right. For any plans that
Dickie Pouncett has in mind I've· spoilt myself rotten. 9
Bubba uses ~he same word, "spoilt," seventeen years later to
describe her devotion to Johnnie Dowd. Olive breus her
date with Dickie, symbolically cutting all ties with the
• past, and turns to Roo for whatever he will give her. She
knows that she cannot have marriage, but she does extract
an alternative promise from hims
Well, let me tell you, marriag;~ana a family's not the
only traps . Marriage I can do wi thout--and i~ I have
to, ·I can live without the thought of kids. The real
trap for me is seeing you walk out that door, and being
left here with a few cheap souveniFs (grabbing the doll
from its vase), knowing that I've ' had the best of it,
and that you're gone for good, and-~never-- ••• (She
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smooths the crum::p1'1 E!kJrt of the kewpie, verr much
a~~r~ that this is a last bid, and she must find the
right words and phrases;) You spend the seasons up ""
there, and you come down here for the lay-offs, like
you said. And every year, in December, w~en you come
down South, you bring me one of these. · (She moves
towards him, holding th~.' do11 before her, facing him.
A pledge,) - And I promise you--if I can have the rest
of it I swear that these are all the kids I'll ever
heed.
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Roo e this . promise, he says he will stay the rest of ,. •
this lay-off and return next summer. Barney and Nancy make
a tentative agreement to meet next year, and the play ends
with Nancy shouting the familiar toast, "Happy days and
glamorous nightsl"
The second play in Lawler's The Doll Trilogy takes its
title, Other Times, from the oft-used phrase in both Kid
Stakes and Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. These are indeed
other times, different both in season and in mood from the
other two. In time it is set in the winter between the
ninth and tenth summer, 1945, the last 'year of the war. Roo
and Barney have beefi in the A rm,y for five years, arranging
leave so as to keep a semblance of the lay-off going. After
having been overseas most of the time, they are no sta­tioned
in South Kensington, within commuting distance of
• Emma's house. The time of year may be different, but the
passion is still there. Roo and Barney still banter with
Emma, and Bubba still dotes on Olive. But there are some
new developments. We get a hint of Nancy's behavior. outside
the lay-off. Barney alludes to the fact that she bas chased
around quite a bit with American soldiers on leave, a real­life
bane to many Australian men abroad during the war. We
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see something of life oltsidr. the canefields and •the pub in
~ the person of Josef Hultz, a Jewish refugee from Austria who
is befriended by Nancy. This relationship pulls her in a
--, direction away from the rest.,_. outside the lay-off world,
fore~hadowing her eventual d~parture. Nancy may be str~y-
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ing, but th others are just as committed. Roo had reali_zed
that with' --w- ar coming the doll.a would be hard to come by, so
he bought six of them and put them away, bringing one out
eaQ)l year. as if it was new. Even Emma makes a half-hearted
committment by giving up all ether boarders except Roo and
Barney, albeit her chief rea·son is to devote all her energy
to some rather shady money-making schemes. The fi.,r. st act
ends with a merry rendition of "There's a Goldmine in the
Sky," full of joy that is lacking in a similar scene eight
years later in The Doll.
The second act introduces the con,f lict. Josef Hultz
comes by to see Emma to get a referral on a place to live,
and Barney assumes that he is calling on Nancy. He _angrily
tells Josef1
Oh, c'mon. (His head appears over the piano.) I know
you got some trouble with the lingo, but it can't be
that bad. Look, Nancy's, free to please herself. Any
time that I'm not here, then she can hit the hay with
who she fancies. Yanks and Dutch and Free French, and
bloody General MacArthur if she likes. But once I'm on
the spot--it's hands off, okay? Blokes . she might have
knocked around with, if the~ want a word with her--they
drop into the pub. (JOSEF stares in silence. BARNEY
misunderstands his react.ion.) ·, :tjo ·objection to ;1ou
stayin' friendly. Times down there I've given the nod
to half the fellers round the bar. But1re all know
who, s the customer that's got p~iority.
Josef is affronted by this and leaves. When Nan~y hears,
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she is naturally offend d that Barney ·has in so m,any words
called h~r a prostitute, She retreats to her bottle (she is
possibly an alcoholic now) and Olive tries to cheer her up
by telling her a bawdy story, sending her into .whoops of '-._
laugh~er and drawing the fun-loving Nancy out of her depres-sion
and a
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from her drinking, at least for a time.
econd scene Roo and Barney have gotten their
C
discharge papers, they are fr~e from the Army. Nancy and
Olive are preparing for a big celebration, and they even
invite Emma. She is still sore over a joke Barney played on
her, out she does not admit this. She tells Nancy that she
nas to go visit Bertie Munro, the new leader of the commun­ity
singing. Roo and Barney arrive home roaring drunk, with
Roo banged up from a fight. Barney tells Olive how Roo took
on two sergeants and a mate of theirs in a local pub. Roo
hates the Army and that is why he has never been promoted;
as Barney says, ,
Hates its guts. Why else d'you think he'd never be
promoted from the ranks? Uh? Somebody like Roo--a
bloke who's run his own gang through the canefields--he
serves five years in the Infantry, and he comes out a
private, same as1~e went in. Didn't that eve~ seem on
the nose to you.
But Nancy understands Barney a,id his manipulations. She
te).ls Olive that Roo was not promoted because then he would
be separated from Barney, and that would 4 mess· up their
visits with the girls, killing the lay-~ff £or good. Olive
sees how much Roo has sacrificed for hera• a positi?n of
leadership in the Army could have been his instead of the - subservient position he maintained with Barney.
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· By the next mornirig Nanc.y has begun to see the eventual , ,,,,.
end of ~he lay-off. Olive •·s "'single-minded fascination with
it has made her blind to the rest of the . world, a world
Nancy knows because of her assoc~ with Josef Hultz.
Nancy_is afraid . that Bubba will get mislead by the lay-off
·.
and see it~ or more than it is worth, and she tells Bubba's
aunts not'- let her visit net door with them anymore.
Nancy, who is truly concerned about Bubba's future and is
the only one who sees the situation clearly, does not want - the girl to get trapped like the rest of them. She explains
to them what it was that made her decide to do this, what
made her become disillusioned with the lay-offs
There was a moment here last night, before Roo lit that
fire, when I thought you were goin' to take a tumble to
yourself. In fact, you almost put it into words, as
far as you're concerned there hasn't been a war these
past five years at all. The boys have come down here
on leave together, full of fun and ready for a - spree,
and it's been just as if they've blown in from the
canefields. Oh, the lay-offs haven't been as long and
regular but we've kept up all the 1trimmings, parties,
dolls and lolly walking sticks, and it's been all the
fun of the fair as usual. For you and Bub-, at any
rate. Never seemed to cross your mind, though, that
the whole thing's been set up for you. And somebody
like Roo has had to cruel himself--yes, cruel himself-­so
you cou1d have your merry-go-round the w~y- you
wanted it. J
Referring to Roo's not being promoted so that the visits
could continue, Nancy has been purposefully harsh to Olive,
trying to snap her into recognizing that there is a real
world going on around them, and th~t they cannot live .
changeless lives in a timeless existence. This myth is what
she is trying to protect Bubba from believing. Josef Hultz
is a symbol of this real world, and when Barney is again
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inconsiderate. to him, Nancy angrily lashes out, revealing a
secret ~rom the pasta ;,.
Yo~ really have to push your luck don't you? (pro­voked
into revelation) Well, it wasn't at the City
Club, as a matter of fact. ~s right here. I was
sick and off work at the- : time, I'd had a--how'll I put
it for you. now? A messy sort of an abortion at a
pretty little house in Qollingwood--that's about th~
best~t I can do with it. And afterwards I lay here
on my~ ck for three weeks with the midwife who had ,
done butchery coming ·in twice a week to take my
temperature. Kidding th~ world and Olive I had
strained myself liftin·' orates down at the City Club.
The sort of tale that--that always gets a lot of sympa­thy
from fellers at a pub ••• wounded in the service
- • • • but the only customer who really--really gave a
damn in those weeks I was off was him. He sent me mes­sages,
and books to read, and wrote me notes he 'didn't
even have the English to--spell properly. So fijn't you
talk to me about no cut-rate bunch of violets.
Barney almost moves to comfort her, he almost takes respon­sibility
for the pain he has caused, and he almost sees the
hopelessness and impermanence of his situation with the lay­off.
But Olive draws him back with talk of writing letters
up North to recreate his and Roo's cane, cutting gang, and he
is again caught up in the dream.
In the last scene Roo has spent his Army gratuity on a
fox cape for Olive, and Barney is trying to sweet talk Nancy
out of her sulk. Leaning over to read the title of a book
she is reading, he jokes, •
BARNEY, Fanny By--what?
NANCY1 Gaslight.
(He reaches forward to take up the book and
verifying the title on the spine binding.
She asks, poker face~1)
You interested?
BARN_EY1 Dunno. (opening at front page) Seen it plenty
of times by e,lectric light and once or twice bf 5a
hurricane lamp, but I never got around to gas. - Nancy remains unmoved by his humorous double entendre. She
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tells him that the aby she aborted was his -, and that she
N #
~ tried to · tell him before he l&ft that year, but she could -
not, ........___
I s'pose I should have d..Qne just that. Come right out
and hollered pregnant. ; • but a girl needs some
~pcourageme·nt. It was the end of the lay-off, and y_ou
r- were gin' back to the canefields •••• Only -the
second ime you'd been down, and I was scared I'd kill
/ .....
the er stone dead with a word ••• I thought th~
easiest way to lead up to my little problem was to talk
about your other bits of ~rouble in that line. So one
night--very crafty--when the others had gone up to bed
and you seemed in a likely mood, I steered the conver-
- sation round to May and Norma, and those mistakes of
yours in Makarandi •••• (She laughs, partly genuine
amusement.) Well even now I don't know whether it was
guilty conscience, or you'd just been waiting for a
chance to get it off your chest ••• but straight out
of the blue you told me of _the butcher's wife in Cook­town,
and the baby daughter she was going to pass off
as her husband's--long as you dropped in a present now
and then •••• After that you really opened up ••••
Likely mood •••• It was a flood. You went on to
tell me how these women up and down the coast made
passes at you coz you'd been the father of two illegit­imate
sons at eighteen. Which had somehow given them
tne notion you were quite a ram and they all felt they
had to try you out ••• and what a battle it was, when
you weren't that sort of6bloke at all, to live up to
this--horny reputation.
What had started out as a tirade ends up as a joke on the
both of them at which they both laugh. They cannot change
mistakes in the past, but they can laugh at them, and they
never stop long enough for re~et.
Olive, too, sees the reality of her situation for a
fleeting momenta a thirty year-old woman living like a
child, letting the outside world pass her by while she hides
in a fantasy. She tells Roo that she doe~ have regrets,
OLIVEa (determinedly) I been through the war as though
it didn't happen--don't say, please, I haven't,
'coz I have. All the time thal it was on, things
would come up now and then--Dickie Pouncett being
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drowned ~ sea that· day his ship -went down--but if
you asked me now t d tell you what the ship was
called-~ .
ROO1 (impatiently} The Perth.
OLIVE, --I wouldn't know. Most of the while here I
been wai ting--not Nan~ went out--but I been ·
waitin' here for yo.u and Barney to come down on
leave. And when you have, to me the whole thing's
been another-- 17 _ .
ROO 1 \. ay-off. Okay. · ·
This not make Olive any less devoted to the
j .
lay-off. She j_ust wants to . have Roo treat her like a woman
and not a child. To show Roo that she is an adult she gives
him the telegrams she wrote and received from up North,
gathering his old gang back together. They want him back as
leader, and Roo says to Olive, in a way of saying that the
lay-off will continue and be better than ever, that he can
now be an even better ganger,
I hated every minute of the crap and kowtow that I had
to go through as a mindless bloody Armf private. And
there were times I'm sorry that I didn t pull more
weight ••• a small patrol they sent us on at Fin­schafen.
We lost two blokes, shov dead, because the
~ergeant that we had was young and scared and felt he
had to strut his stuff. I reckqn if I'd b~en in charge
those two blokes mighta come back safe and sound •••
but that's all in the game and I'm not 'F.;1nna lose no
sleep about it now I'm out the Army. I 11 be a tougher
ganger than I was before and .runnin' my own team up
North will meani~ while lot more to me than it did
before the war.
And so the lay-off is back on~ with Roo and Olive even more
dedicated to it. Only Nancy gives a hint of something else
in her last line,
BARNEY, (to EMMA} Don't wait up for us. The streets
are full of sexy devils hoggin' for it.
(He follows NANCY out on t o the front veran­dah,
slips an arm around her . and says with
mock tenderness.}
Fanny By Gaslight. •
(She turns her head to look at him,}
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NANCY, Some4e,~ I'm ~nna meet a fell:er whoi~ not only
seen it, but who ·s ~read the book. • • .
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Nancy makes good her warning when seven years later she mar-ries
a bookseller. But for now ~u.r are set on having
fun and game~, l;lnd Nancy even brings Bubba back into the
group~
ing as
r the two couples have left we see Bubba emerg­w
Olive of The Dgll in her dialogue with Emma,
1
EMMA, So ••• it's all ' up, then, with your scholar-ship
chances, is it?
BUBBAa I dunno. Still got lots of time.
_ EMMA, Yeah. You still got that.
BUBBA1 Anyway, I never did see myself as matron of a
hospital, or--them things Nancy said. Just a
joke.
EMMA1 Doesn't have to be.
BUBBA1 Well ••• all depends on what you're 2ijfter,
doesn't it? And if you strike it lucky?
Bubba has already abandoned any ideas for a future outside
of the lay-off. And so as the curtain falls on this play,
the action is set for Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Olive
is aggressively devoted to the lay-off ,i n spite of every-thing,
Roo ·.is Feady to be a ganger and wants even more to
0
please Olive. Barney is hanging onto Roo for support.
Nancy is caught between the lay-off and the real world,
leading to her marriage. Emma is bitter and just waiting
for someone to stumble. Bubbi is ready for someone like
Roo to come into her life.
In 1977 the entire trilogy was performed by the Mel­bourne
Theatre Company shortly afte_r the premiere of Other
Times on its own. It was an important

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PIONEERING NATIONAL DRAMA: RAY LAWLER'S CONTRIBUT.IONS TO \
AUSTRALIAN THEATRE · , . . (
East Texas State University M.A.. 1986
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Copyright 1'986
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PIONEERING NATIONAL DRAMA,
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, RAY LAWLER_ 'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO AUSTRALIAN THEATRE
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William Scott Lancaster
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Submitted .. to the Faculty of the· G:r,aduate School of
East ·Texas State University
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as partial fulfillment of the requirements .~.-r
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MASTER OF ARTS
August, 1986
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PIONEERING NATIONAL DRAMA1
RAY LAWLER'S C.. ONTRN!UTION.. S TO AUS~RALIAN THEATRE
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Thesis Approved:
Thesis Advisor
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. ean foraduae Studies and Research
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COPYRIGHT 1986 by W. Scott Lancaster
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Advisor,
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ABSTRACT
PIONEERING NATIONAL DRAMA1
·RAY LAWLER •s.:coNTRIBUTIONS
' TO AUSTRALIAN THEATRE
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! ~.i.a m Scott Lancaster, M.A. t Texas State University
1 Dr.. Anthony j. Buckley
I
The purpose of this study· was to identify how Ray
Lawler helped in bringing Australian t~eatre into the main­stream
of international drama, paving the way for a solid
indig~nous movement among fellow playwrights. while at the
same time bringing realistic Australian, characters to the
stage for the first time.
" - Lawler·· s status was scrutinized throu~h · an examination
of his kn.own body of plays, ·most notably hi~ . m~jor success,
•
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. Reviews, commentaries,
arid sociological studies were., consulted to understand the
impa,c t Lawler had at home and abroad. Supporting the find-
_ing that Lawler did have a meaningful impact· on Australian ·
drama, a study was also made of th~ school of playwrights
who, for five years, foll9wed in his fo~tsteps.
In conclusion, it was noted that, ~hile_ Lawler did have
., - a profound effect on Australian playwriting,· he ~lso helped
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{ bring about acceptance of J:lip country's drama both nation­ally
and internationally.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ·
I wo~ld like to thank Jan' Kemp, Marsha ·Blair, and
Frank Newhouse of the Interlibrary Loan Department at East
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Texas State University for their . help in gathering the
research m~terials needed for this study. I would also
like to thank Dr. Anthony J. Buckley, ·my thesis advis~r,
for ~is ~i~e and pati~nce throughout this project. I
would like to -especially thank the cast and crew of Summer
of the Seventeenth Doll for their time. 1a.nd hard work in
helping me to understand Ray Lawler better by sharing one
of his
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Figures
Chapter
1. Introduction
2. The Doll
Table of Contents
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3. The Bushman and Retreat from Realism.
4. -The Trilogy ..
5. "Slum Drama"
6. Dramatic Pioneer.
Biblio~raphy
~ Appendices
1.
2.
A Texan Production of The Doll
Figures ' Vita
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Letter to Patron • • • . . . . . . . . . .
Letter to the Editor of the Melbourne Sun.
Reply from the Editor of the Melbourne Sun
Reply to the Editor of the Melbourne Sun.
Press Release to the Melbourne Sun. . .
Program Cover, . . . . . . . . . .
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Program. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Program, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Program, • . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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CHA,PTER 1
Introduction
I-On
28 November 1955 at the Union Theatre, Melbourne,
international recognition finally came to Australian drama.
On that night Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, a new play by
unknown playwright Ray Lawler, had its premiere under the
sponsorship of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust .and
wlth the aid of the Playwrights Advisory Board. The Doll
became an instant hit at home and later abroad. Lawler fol­lowed
with several lesser known and less memorable plays.
J
Fellow playwrights, attempting to reproduce his suc~ess,
followed Lawler with a spree of naturalistic dr~as set ~in ·
I
the same mold as The Doll. Lawler's work and the genre he
inspired are the subject of this thesis. Chapter two will
deal with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, its history, and
•
several of its productions. Chapter three wi11 deal with
Lawlerts next work, The Piccadilly Bushman, and two of his
' . lesser works, The ynshaven Cheek and The Man Who Shot the
Albatross. Chapter four will deal with The D,oll Trilogy, in
which Lawler wen~ back and wrote two more plays involving
the characters in The Doll. Chapter five will deal with
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"Slum Drama," the genre· Lawler inspired, concentrating on
• four of the plays of the periods The Multi-Coloured
Umbrella, by Barbara Vernon; The Shifting Heart, by Richard
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{ Beynon; The Slaughter of St. ,Teresa's Day, by Peter Kenna; • !? C
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and The One Day of the Year, by Alan Seymour.
Until the 194o's there were no plays of production
quality written by Australian ·playwrights. Because ~ re
was no theatrical organizati.Q. ~ to train riew pla~ights ~d
incub~te new plays, what local plays there were were ama-teurish
and and of poor construction. Commercial theatres
showed little interest in anything other than imported
plays which were promised moneymakers. In 19J8 the Play­wrights
Advisory Board was founded in Sydney to help the
aspiring nattve playwright. Its. aims were as follows,
Playwrights . and producing groups were to be cir- ·
cularized. The Board would offer to give opinions on
any long· or short play submitted to it, and for a •very
small fee. Criticism based on a number of readings
would be sent to the author of a rejected play, or one
which the readers thought might be made more workable .
after rewriting.. While the Board had no producing
machinery itself, plays accepted for its "passed" list
would be offered to various groups from among those
that had1indicated they would be i nterested to see such
scripts. ·
The Board was set up not only to critique new plays but also
as a clea~ing house for those worthy of production. Being
put on the Board's "passed _,list, however, did not neces­sarily
guarantee production. r For years regional playwrit­ing
competitions had offered their winners to various groups .,
with little success. Small theatres conducted private read- , -q
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i~ of locally written plays, · but only a token few reached
the professional stage in Australia,, whi.ph was mostly inter­ested
in plays imported from London after a successful run
in. the West End. Because there was litt le hope for local
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{ writers of ever having their ,plays professionally produced, • ,!-
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most talented playwrights were forced to make a living else­where
and did not perfect their craft. Production is an
essential step in wri'ting a play, and of _course an ncome
is needed by· any· artist whq qevotes full time to his wor~.
At this time the Australian theatrical network was set up
to sponsor only English playwtights. But fortunately for
Australian dramatists, the network did eventually turn its
interest away from England to -within itself for cultural
identity.
- After the Second World War ended there were new feel-
. ings of nationalism in Australia. Many citizens sougtt an
identity separate from Great Britain, and this . included ·. '- .
those in drama. In 1947 P~ime Minister J. B. ,Chifley asked
the British Council to help in assessing the possibility of
creating a National Theatre for Australia. Tyrone Guthrie
I
was sent to evaluate the situation. rn his re'port he said '
that perhaps Australia needed a few more years of tutelage
under the British theatrical network. As H. G •. Kippax
explained, Guthrie's haughty personality and cocksuredness
had unexpected resu!ts, •
The suggestion that Australian t~ste may not be
ehtirely perfect and that Australia might, in cer.tain
matters, be a decade or two behind certain other com­munities,
aroused a tremendous head of ate~. Persons
who had not otherwise given a snap of their fingers to
support a national theatre felt a ·passionate eagerness
for Australia to possess such an institution, and~
passionate rage against the sneering, bl~qdy Pommy who
dared suggest that the time was not yet. - In defiance, Rusty Bugles was produced the very _~ext year.
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The play, written 'by noted ndvelist Sumner Locke-Elliott,
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is a tale of a group of soldiers stationed in the Northern
Territory during the war. It was the first to use authentic
Australian ~ernacular and colloquialisms. De(fPite the· fact
.that it played only i0 ustr~ia, it was a welcome indica­tion
to the country that they .could produce good drama, even
if only for themselves. Anti9ipation stirred as people
waited expectantly for another hit,...wt one never arrived,
Instead, there was a forgotten stream of bush plays con- -
taining little more than a chance for the writer to demon­strate
nis skill at transposing speech patterns. A critic
for the Bulletin described the plot of such a plays
. They consist mostly of an im_possible new-chum lost
in the .e:eat, dry interior, witn ra kangaroo in the
extreme distance, and an emu, or Erome other natural
songbird, thrown in as an extra. Also the story is
garnished by a shearers' riot, and a bushman's grave,
and there is the customary goldfield, and the hero
walks off unconcernedly with eight alleged cwt, of bul­lion
on his back. Naturally enough he is stopped by
thirty-eight bushrangers, but he puts down his load and
says, 'Wot 01' or someth~ng· like it, and slo~s thirty­eight
of them in the eye. Then Dampier finds it neces­sary
to bl.ot-out seven cwtA of the gold lest it should
break the hero's back, and he draws his pen through.·
thirty-four of the largest bushrangers, so as .to make
them more manageable, and when he comes across a woman
who was lost for eighteen days without food or water,
he fixes branches on to ~er and turns her .into a tree
as a sacrifice to probab!lity, and just when he has got
over those difficulties he finds that the new-chum il'.1_
the first act has been altogether forgotten, and must
be struck out altogether or else be used as .an abori­ginal,
Generally he gives up at this point 9.11d another
Australian drama goes to join the heap under -the
table .J · .
It is plain to see why they were. re~dYi or a change. Those
who longed for such a change came to re.~ize that fertile
ground needed to be prepared from which the fledgling dra•m a
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could emerge.
Trust formed.
Thus was the Australian Elizabethan Theatre . .,lo . •
Theatre of Australians by Au~tralians for
~stralians became the by-phrase for the Trust. Early in
1954 Dr. H. C. Coombs, governor of the Commonwrilth Banlc
5
Who W~S intere~ted in the perfqrming arts and was lookjng
for a new sideline, made . a personal announcement saying that
such a.n org~lzatio~would be ,~o~ed,' elaborating its pur­poses
in Meanjins
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The ultimate aims must be to establish a native
drama, opera and ballet. which will give professional
employment to Australian actors, singers and dancers
and furnish opportunities for those such as writers,
composers and 8-lj:tists whose creative work is re_lated
to the theatre.
Coombs' idea was not to establish an actual theatre build­ing
or a performing group, but rather to encour~and sup­~
ort existing groups which met minimum requirements. He and
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the board of directors excited the public and raised a con- . ..
siderable amount of ·money; and then thet brought in English-man
Hugh Hunt as the first director of the Trust. Fresh
from assignment at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Hunt brought
to Co9mbs 1
· idealism a practical knowledge of the commercial
theatre.
In 19i4 the Playwrights A•d visory Board offered ~wo hun-dred
pounds to the best play submitted. Out of one hundred
and thir~ scrtpts, first place was divided between Oriel
Gray's The Torrents and Ray Lawler's Summer of the Seven-
. . teenth ·Doll. Part of .. their prize wa.s that the Board would
seek to negotiate a production. Both .n~w plays were offered
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to the newly formed Trust. Arrangements were made with the
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,N Union Theatre at the Univers-if.ty of Melbourne, and in 1955
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the Trust sponsored, as its first loca, ly written play,
Summer of'~he Seventeenth Doll.
.,.--' The Doll was greeted with an enthusiasm and an admira-tion
which sometimes seemed to turn to awe. After its or i­ginal
.production it toured the entire continent. People .
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drove for thousands of miles to see it, one man even swam a
river. National pride· supported The Doll and finally
opened the door for Australian playwrights to stand up and
be counted with the rest of the world's dramatists.
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Notes
1 Leslie Rees, The Making of Australian Drama (Sydneys
Angus and Robertson, 1973), P• 476.
· 2 H. G. Kippax, "Drama," in Australian Society, A
So~wical Introduction (n.p., n.p., n.d.), p. 506, cited
by William Ralph Levis, "An Experiment with Identi tys Aus­tralian
Drama from 1969 to 1974," Diss. Univ: of Minn.,
1977, p. J.
J Bulletin, J Jan. 1891, p. 7, cited by Virginia Kirby­Smi
th, "The Development of Australian Theatre and Drama,
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1788.:..1964," Diss. Duke Univ., 1969, PP• 84~5.
4 Her bert Cole Coombs, Meanjin, Winter 1954, n. pag.,
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cited. by Rees,. pp. 250-1.
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CHAPTER 2
The Doll
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The decade of the 1950's brought the winds of change
to an until then r~latively complacent Australian society.
These changes are mirrored. in Ray Lawler's highly successful
play Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, known now to critics
simply as The Doll. Written in 1954, The Doll won several
writing awards before it was chosen in 1955 as the first
locally written play to be sponsored by the newly formed
Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, an organization dedi­cated
to the establishment of an indi{enous Australian
_ drama. ,
Like the Irish movement which had nurtured the growth
of a nationalistic drama there, the Trust had been formed
by Australians who were. ready to work for the emergence of
a truly Australian form of drama. Noted theatre cr itic and
historian H. G. Kippax saids •
The audience were ~n .a mood to receive a good
Australian play. Australia's expanding secondary
industries and its diminishing depend.enc~ on British
markets and British power were produci~ impulses to .
be self-reliant. A new kind ·of pragmatic, unromantic
nationalism was in the making. From it there flowed, •
besides an independent foreign policy, an increasing
middle-class interest in the development of conspic­uous
methods of1national self-e"J@re~sion as means of
self-assertion •.
Australians were indeed ready when on 28 November· 1955 The
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r Do~l had it~ premiere perfo~~ance at the Union Theatre in
Melbourne. Each successive night brought- more praise, more
revenue, and more acco~ades for Lawler's script. The play
transferred to Sydne~ and from there it went u't in several
productions all over the con·tinent, where it was received
with ~agerness, pride, and a~ by many who had never before
seen~ play, much less a play) abo~t themselves and their
lives. It is to this day considered by many to be the most
ma~Mally written play by an ·Australian. At the very
least it is a ~ajor milestone in the development of Austra­lian
drama. Theatre critic Wal Cherry proclaimed in 1964
that its arrival was inevitable,
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Sooner or later somebody ~as bound to come up with
a play, big enough in its own right, which would fuse
the foreign with the vernacular, and create from the
rough tradi~ions of the Australian drama a convention
strong enough to sustain a dramatic vision whieh is
almost too close for comfort-to our own hearts. Mr.
Lawler has done this, and done it magnificently. Sum­mer
of the Seventeenth Doll is the' ll)OSt playable, the
most t~eatrically sound play by an Australian yet pro-duced.
·
And so it was that in 1955 Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
came along as a culmination of many hopes and dr7ams.
Universal. in theme while typically Australian in char-acter,
it tells a story of fai•l ure, a faPlur-e which · inevit- .
ably comes to us all. It is failure to re1J1.ain young·, to
remain intmutable. It is a tale of aging and the ability or
inability people have in coping with the social and emo­tional
changes which oocur when we and our envr ronment suf­fer
the effects of time. This motif, common as it is to
all men, was particularly appropriate to the socie~y from
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which it sprang, an Australia rising out of its insulated
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~ childhood, looking wistfully back to the past and apprehen­sively
ahead to a future in w~ich many felt displaced. A
country which had maintained its youth longe '9han most be-
~ cause -of seclusion was suddenly finding itself more and
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more a part of a brave new world. But where did this play,
The Doll, come from that seeme,. d to embody all of these
social and cultural dreams and visions? It came from a
re~~ly unknown playwright and actor named Ray Lawler.
Ray Lawler was born in 1921 in Footscray, a suburb of
Melbourne, Victoria. He left school at an early age to find
work during the Great Depression. He later attended drama
classes in the evening and joined Sid Turnbull's Melbourne
Repertory Company. In 1954 he . joined the Union Repertory
Company in Melbourne. In 1955 that group, under the aus­pices
of the Trust, presented Lawler's tenth play, Slc.unmer
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of the Seventeenth Doll.· The play was an immediate success
0
despite the fact that it took quite a bit of convincing
before the Trust would even consider a local play, as evi-
•
denced in this excerpt from t he correspondence of Hugh
Hunt, then director of the .. Tru.s ts ·
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll interested me far
more but ••• it lacks dramatic impact and, for this
reason, would, I think, be unsuitable for the large
theatres. Both these plays (referring to Oriel Gray's
The Torrents) should, I think, be done at the little
theatres to start with. I think the Trust would be
int erested in providing a guarantee against loss for
Lawler's play if~ suitable producti on can be found.
I wonder if Doris Fritton would like to undertake it
at the Independent ••• or, better st~ll, whether the
Union Theatre, Melbourne, would do - it?
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Luckily for Australian drama, Mr. Hunt and· the Trust took
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the risk ~d helped produce L.awler • s play. Hunt• s ~ssign-me
nt before the Trust was at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin,
and many hoped for a ranaissance comparable to...,,that which
had taken place jn Irish drama. Critic Lindsay Browne was
so excited at the premiere th~t he forgot that the first
reaction the Irish had to its 1own nationalistic theatre had
been negatives
This fine play,_ untransplantably Australian in all
~ accents, gave Australian the·atre-goers the chance
to feel as American audiences must have felt when
O'Neill first began to assert American vitality and
independence in drama, or as the Irish mus~ have felt 4 when Synge gave them The Playboy of the Western World.
Unlike Synge, who had to wait for his work to catch on with
the Irish audience and critics, Lawler was immediately
thrust into the national and and international spotlight.
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He wro·te several plays after The Doll but none of them equal
its success. In The Doll he captured 1t}1e voice of his
nation.
Extreme isolation has always been both a blessing and .. a curse to Australia, shaping and molding its soci~ty. This
isolation, in union with attitudes engendered by the early
settlement of Australia as a ,enal colony by England, helped
to establish the so-called Australian Myth. This myth, that
a people can both love and hate a land for the same reason
at the same time, has nonetheless been yery strong despite.
the fact that only a small portion of Audtralians today are
actually descended from convicts. Often faflJely accused and
unjustly tried in English courts, transported as ·far as pos-
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sible from everything they knew, rejected and forgotten in
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. ~ a bizarre region, these early men and woman hated and
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feared the unknown land that loomed endlessly before them,
and yet found a love for it by its being so iiar'away from
that society which had banished them. Their bitterness and ....
hatred for the Engli~t system .was strangely matched by
their devotion to England as ~oth a social" and a cultural
leade It is the nature of th~ myth that both feelings
c well in the same person, paradoxical as it seems.
That anyone could live with such :3- paradox requir~s decep­tion;
deception with~n one's self and within a society. In
this case, distance lent enchantment by preserving a static
but comfortable balance, a balance reality would destroy,
and eventually did. As the years went by and war and con­flict
ravaged Europe and the rest of the world, Australians
found a new comfort in their isolated and private home. In
the midst of global fear and danger, Au' stralia went
unthreatened, alone and often forgotten. Even the First
World War posed no immediate threat. Australians fought and
died in battles, most notably at Gallipoli, but they were
halfway around the world figh»ing enemies who never showed
the slightest interest in the southern hemisphere. World
War Two burst the bubble of serenity, its Pacific arena
bringing danger much closer to .home. Australians were
jarred when Japanese planes bombed t~e city of Darwin on the
northern coast. Little damage was sustained, but the coun­try
was nevertheless violated and would . never be the same.
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Victory at war ended such t~r~ats, but peacetime advance-ments
brought a struggling Australia farther into the main­stream
of international life. Commercial airplanes
. . .
decreased the travel time to Europe and . Amer~a'. bringing
new · t ~ade, new immigrants, a new cultural identity, and new
respo~sibilities. To many thi's was a blessing, a boost in
national pride which would benefit all. Others, such as
veterans who had seen the cruelty of the world, saw the
cpm,ges as an encroachment by hostile outside forces on what
had been a happy and blissfully worry free existence.
Regardless of anyone's opinion or actions, a momentum was
already set which nothing could atop. Australia was becom­ing
more than -an outback country, it was becoming an equal
member in world society.
Whereas earlier plays used the outback in showi ng how
the country affected its people, The Dotl is placed in
Carlton, a somewhat scruffy suburb of Melbourne. In a
nation which was nearly all metropolitan, it is notable
that this was the first popular play to be set in o.n e of
the larger cities. ~n this place, for sixteen summers,
barmaids Olive and Nancy have .entertained their boYt:riends
for five months out of the year and wa~ted patiently for the
other seven months while the men worked cuttfng cane in
Queensland. The lay-off season, as. they refer to their
summer with Roo and Barney, has been a wonderful time, a
time cherished by Olive, as she explains to Pearla
Compared to all the marriages I know, what I. got is-­is
five months of heaven every year ; And it's the same
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''way to· ful­f~
l whateve~ work they did, they could ffave~been sai­+
ors at-sea--that itinerant quality. They could have
been sailors going away--0fi a long sea trip and comi~g
back, it cou~d have been that quite easily and . this
set up circumstances in which the wome~· the rela- _
tionship had to live a 1 · fe of their own. They came·
together for a time, for· a lay-off, a gre t celebra­tion
·, and then each went independently on their way
again, so that each year something was achieved, some­thing
was cemented and h~ld and built on and yet it
- wasn't in any way a parallel to marriage • The ba~k­ground
of it, the cane-cutting. and the fact that they
followed the sun down, comi~ down from the north,
these were all incidentals,
Lawler might have chosen the canefields as the home of his
characters by chance, but because in Roo and Barney we see
the land as an isolated factor it is much more powe.rful and
more a true symbol of what makes Australia uniquv e. out­back.
A national characteristic, or any characteristic for
that matter, is defined best through a ~tereotyped indivi­dual
who is affected by nothing else; But The Doll is more
than just a display of stereotypes. Lawler•s firm grasp on
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theme and plot and his skilled ·writing style keep The Doll
from becoming just a bizarre character study.
r
Realistic drama of this period is noted for its use of
violence, and in The Doll violence occurs. T_hese people
are inarticulate, and as such they cannot verbally resolve ·
their differences. Instead, they attempt to resolve prob­lems
physically. This ·is the justification which makes
violence essential. Lawler handles such action well by
keeping a constant grasp on the story line. to which the
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violence always relates. When Roo and Barney or Roo and
Olive have a "blue" we know it is because they have deep
feelings, feelings we understand because they are direct
outgrowths of what has happened, and not simpiy' gratuitous • .
In lesser plays this is not t_p.e case and the violence ha~
no meaning beyond merely being a device. Besides the use
of viqlence, there are other distinguishing marks in~
Doll of this particular genre of realism.1 Tho.a- comes out
mos.:t notably in character treatment.
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Pearl in~The Doll represents a character that had
become well known to Australians, the outsider. She can be
.seen as the carping immigrant, the constant complainer, the
"winging Pommy bastard" who had harrassed native Australians
for so long. It is through her that much of the conflict
is fired. Her refusal or her inability to fit i ~ the
situation angers Olive and hastens the .f inal downfall.
Like any outsider, she is strange and awkward. She tells
Olive that she wants to fit in with the lay-off, to over­come
her strangeness, but she is secretly a liar. Like
many newcomers who seem callous because they cannot sea the
beauty of a thing out of the :p,ast, she wants to change the
•
si_tuation and the others' lives to suit herself. She wants
to marry Barney even before she has met him. ·. She also
serves the important function of allowing exposition to be
revealed to the audience in a natural wa~. Like the audi­ence,
she is wondering what has been going on here for the
- past sixteen summers. It is through her prying questions
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that the audience learns what has transpired. We are sym-
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~ -pathetic with her for her confusion and her incapacity to
fit in with the others, as audience we identify with her
position because we also are newcomers to th ~elationships,
but~ also understand why and how she could elicit anger
. .
and frustration from Olive, w~o desperately wants Pearl to
fill the gap left by Nancy so , that everything ~ill stay
unchanged.
- Olive's mother, Emma, is a source of humor and wisdom,
· and as such she also becomes an important drarqatic device,
the raisonneur. In most cases, when time that should have
been spent on plot development is instead spent on a display
of manners and on needless tangents involving perhaps inter­esting
but nonetheless nonessential characters~ as was the
case with many of Lawler's co~rary imitators, . the plot
and theme are improperly matured. A de,n ouement is then
hurri~dly summed up in a speech delivered by some knowing
and wise person, the raisonneur. nu.s rson explains to
fellow characters and the audience just what has happened . and what the consequences will be. The Doll does not need
this device, but because L~wlir uses it anyway, he created
what many critics felt was a major flaw in the writing.
Plot and theme are always clearly defined and there is no
need for this speech which Emma delivers to Rooa
You listen--before Barney started to get the brushoff
from women, he oniy skited. Now he"lies. Work it out
for yourself. When did he start lyin' about you? Eh?
Yeh, I might be a damned old fool around the place,
but I can still nut this one out. · You and Barney are
two of a pair. Only the time he spent chasin' wimmen,
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. ' you put in bein' top dog! Well, that's all very fine
and a lot of fun while ··i t lasts, but last is one
thing it just don't do. ..' There 's a time.. for sowin'
and a time 8for reapin'--and reaping is what you're
doin' now.
To Lawler .this may have seemed the only way &ali ty co·uld
get tprough to Roo, but to m.a. ny critics it was extraneou·
and even pretentious.
Other things about The Di ll set the pace for a stream
of plays which followed. The use of a single set and a
sm~l cast of characters seem petty but was a practical
19
· necessity if new plays were to be produced. More signifi­cantly,
there is the use of symbolism, used expertly by
Lawler but rather ineptly by hi's followers. The doll is an
obvious child symbol, and the conferral of it by Roo to
Olive is i tself a symbol of timelessness and rejuvenation.
Every summer Roo has given Olive a kewpie doll, and this
summer he presents her with the seventeenth. Through the
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,
cyclical pattern of giving, Roo and Olive can ignore
change, maintaining the illusion that time goes back each
year to the previous summer when Olive received the last .
doll. The doll itself, unlike real children such as the
neighbor girl Bubba, never ages. It always remains exactly
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the same, reinforcing the aspect of timelessness. But more
realistically, and even more hidden to Roo and Olive, the
dolls are the lifeless offspring of an unhappy, barren, arid
lifeless relationship. Throughout all ~he years the cha,r,,- - acters have remained unaware of the· dolls' symbolic func-tion,
regarding them merely as gifts o~ love.
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For nearly seventeen ye~rs Roo, Barney, and Olive have
lived seemingly ageless 1·ves filled with youthful happi-ness,
are just too
with Dowd;
dowed Roo for years.
ot continue. The tides of change
ingratiates himself
the same way he sha­A
born follower, he needs a strong _
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leader. Roo is crushed by thi rejection.
.
Mounting tension
and bitterness explode in a fight between the two men,
destroying their friendship. As Barney packs to leave with
Dowd, Roo finally realizes that he cannot control events
any longer, he must bend with them. Barney may find himself
another "1ittl,e -· tin god," but for Roo the path is not so
easy. For years he and Olive both have shunned the idea
of marriage, but now with no other alternative, Roo faces
cruel reality and proposes to her. For Olive this .is
unacceptable, Her one comfort 9+1 thesp years, the thing
that she t ells her married friends, is that what she and
Roo have is better than marriage. Marriage after that many
years of what they had would betray the validity o.f that
unique relationship, make it meaningless, idenitfy it as a
dead end. Unable to change like Nancy, unable to a~apt to .. a new world, Olive simply refuses to accept any compromise.
She angrily pummels Roo in the chest and walks off trance­like.
She will have _no part of the. new_ world, preferring
/ to live in a fantasy of the past.
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Who will inherit this new world? Nancy and others
like her who can and will adapt out of the past will surely
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{ survive in it, but at a lo~s ;of self. Roo and Barney leave
\
together,
have seen
said
Reality",
_hope in their"{uture? We '
man Australian dream die, as ~erry Goldie
cle "Dolls~ Homes and the Anger of
e "two eagles" of ·Doll depend not on family bl!t
o other. In Australian literary history Judith
Wright notes "the unspok4n assumption that the male­to-
male relationship alone can be trustworthy and
uncomplicated." Tom Inglis Moore, maintaining that
this was not confined to ' literature, states that in
- the beginning, mate ship "was itself a strong, pr_actical
reality in the bush world, an efficient and often
necessary method of handling the hard facts of the
world·, such as hardsh·i~, danger and isolation."
Moore's perhaps romantic belief in mateship and ·the
bush myth is reflected in the dream worlds of Barney
and Roo. They see the glories of mateship and "the
hard facts" of their lives as great ennobling features
of Australian existence. Moore asserts that "Summer
of the Seventeenth Doll shows how the loyalty of mates
can break under strain, and though Roo and Barney go
off together at the end of .the play they leave a bat­tered
mate ship behind them as well as a broken· doll."
Moore's error is that rather than a battered mateship
it .is the battered mateship. It is not just the rela­tionship
of Barney and Roo that iJ over, the old ideal
of mateship is past. When Barney did not leave the
canefields with Roo, the road downhill for mateship
was clear. The bush life is given over to Dowd, who
lacks this single-minded devotion to an ideal, and Roo
is r~ady to foresake Barney to propose marriage to
Olive.9 •
Roo and Barney, their lives b,a, ttered and broken like the
doll, have most certainly lost a great deal of their lives'
meaning. Only in Dowd and the neighbor girl, Bubba, do we
I
see a real promise for the future. Goldie also saids
Dowd• s triumph over Roo is no·t the rise of the -new
ideal hero but neither is it a simple rejection of bush
experience. Part ·of the change is suggested by Dowd's
potential relationship with Bubba, who says "this is
the only chance I've ever had of cemin' close to--I
dunno--whatever it is I've been watchin' all these
years." She goes on to tell Roo "I '11 have what yqu
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had--the real 'Rart of -it--.but I '11 have it differently.
Some way I can-have it s~e and know that it's going ,
to last." · That word "real" seems to suggest the
change for Dowd and Bubba, now called Kathy. They
ill continue the ex:perience but they witb not allow
pe associated illusion~.to defea~ them.
Lawl 's
d Dowd, ·who see the beauty of the past along with
s, faults, and p~tfalls are the true heirs of
Though less qedicated to the ideal, they ,.
are realistic enough to keep what they have and make it
work for their future.
,- The Trust, Lawler, and all those involved with The
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Doll in Australia looked with trepidation and a little fear
on the prospect of taking the production out into the
world. Not only were they wondering what the critical
reaction to it would be, they were concerned also that
international audiences would think that all Austr~ians
were like the characters in The Doll. But the step had to
I
be taken. Overcoming doubts and obstacles, The Doll went
on the road, or more appropriately, on the air in a plane.
Subsequent performances with an all Australian cast in
Edinburgh, Newcastle, and London proved to the rest of the
world, and reassured the homeland, that there was a rising .• .
talent down under. Bruce Gran~, a newspaper writer from
Australia who was living in London at the ti~e of the pre­miere
there, brought together several English critics'
reactions in an article he wrote in 1957 ,for Meanjin,
The English went for the play with as much enthu­siasm
as the Australians. The- reaction of the critics
left public opinion in no doubt. Unlike most contem­porary
plays The Doll did not divid~ the critics1 it
united them, high and low. The man from The Times was
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perha~ least touched,. yet he found the peopl~ of the
drama 'c uriously endearfng in the simplicity of their
toughness .' and concluded · that al though ·the evening wa's
never as exciti~ as it promised to be it was 'never
altogether dull. For readers of this newspaper such
restrained praise by no means signified damnation.
The popular press enjoyed itself immensely--sub-editors
~swell -as -critics. Th~ Daily Express heading 'The
Aussies Bring Us The Play Of The Year' was a fair sum-mary
the e~thusiasm of the critic, John Barber.
Qecil W lson of the Dailij Mail lost himself in the _
play 'raw humanity--a umanity that reduces our own
anaemic drawingroom plays to still life.'. The heading
was, 'This Doll Is Fair Dinkum, Cobber, Just Fair
Dinkum.' Alan Dent of the News Chronicle found the
play 'pure Australian' ahd remarked on the 'rich Aus-
- tralian accents, so remarkably like Cockney in their
vla.y.' The heading was, . 'New Play From Down Under Is
Just "Dinkum."' The tabloid Daily Mirror saids 'It's
A Wow From Down-Under' and described the play as 'rug­ged
as an Aussie on the spree' and 'raw, vital stuff
••• as powerful and intoxicating as Aust~alian
brandy.' The Sketch saids 'It's A Beaut, This Aussie
Hotchpotch' and, in four sentences of review, described
the male leads as 'baldies' who 'cry "That's a beaut!"
and chase comely ladies' and the tfdies as 'letting rip
with the most unladylike things.'
To the pleasure of all those involved ~ England received
. '
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll very we,l l and the production,
which. had been arranged by Laurence Olivier, ran many suc-cessful
weeks before being transferred to New York. But
just how important was English acceptance of The-Doll to
the Trust and to Australian drama? For years Australia had
looked to England for cultur~ guidance, but now these
"colonials" did not necessarily yearn for approval; as
Bruce Grant saids
It must have seemed like the end of a long road
••• to ali those who had sponsored The Doll from the
beginning. Yet within minutes we had agreed that
fundamentally it 4id not matter whe t her the play went
well in London or not. A failure would set the Eliza­bethan
Theatre Trust back financially; it might preju­dice
the presentation on Broadway.· But it would not
disprove anything about the play. If English audiences
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24
did. not like the play, so much the worse for them.
The___Australians--or a ·gopd number of them--had liked
it; ~ey had even been moved by it. The West End wa~
refined to the point of exhaustion, anyway. To hell
with i ti Back to the Gr.eat South Land where life is
raw and dramatic and sentiment8t2and where the theatre
has its great days ahead.of it. - The Australians· now had enou~h confidence to accept their
1
nativ·e wo,Jrk\ : s good. The fact that English critics and
audiences praised it only reinforced this confidence.
New York critics and audiences found The Doll harder
to_take and understand. They generally felt that the script
- ~d acting were good, as Richard Watts, Jr. of the New York
Post explained,
\
One immense virtue of the play is that it always
gives the impression of having been written out of the
author's heart and soul and because he had something
that he passionately wanted to say. There are seven
characters, and all of them seem utterly real. That
air of honesty and integrity is always1~resent, and it
gives the drama a fresh sense of life. · .
But others felt cheated, they felt tha,t ·they we~ eing
one small seamy side of Australian life through several
inarticulate people. Some, like John Chapman of the Daily
News, could not understand the dialect,
The unique tongue they speak tricked my ear last
evening and makes it difficult for me to make a lucid
and understanding report. By the time I realized that
Bonnie was not a girl bu\ a man named Barney (played
by the author) I was now trying to unravel the sounds
an Austrf!ian makes when he essays a simple word like
bastard.
The play was not a success in New- York and closed after only
twenty-nine performances. Why could American audiences not
accept it? A writer for the Reporter tried to find an
answers
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i'-.ay Lawler has written an honest~ engrossing play
about real people, and . flUCh of its interest was height­ened
by the unfamiliarity of i~s background. In trying
to disc·~er why Doll failed- here while it succeeded< in
London, the obvious explanation--and one used by many
reviewers --was that this very unfamiliarity of milieu
and accent proved obstacles to American understanding .
But I do not think this 1.s the real answer. I think
it r.1ay have _failed because Lawler, honest dramatist
though he is, was still not artist enough to make this
specin experience a universal one. For certainly
~rt is eeded to bring power .and meaning to the crude~
ness a society in whic~ a Kewpie doll ifsa symbol
of happiness as well as a thing of beauty.
Was Summer of the Seventeenth Doll simply not universal
encwgh to play well to American audiences? Perhaps so, but
a review in Commonweal compared Lawler favorably with
several important American playwrights,
His quality is seen to advantage in light of his
American peers, all of whom work a comparable vein.
He has some of liir. Arthur Miller's dogged thrust, but
a more acute ear and less doctrinaire social egotism;
he shares with Odets the pictureeque homeliness of the
actual, and some wry delight in that, and there is a
not unconsiderable affinity with Mr. Paddy Chayefsky;
similar milieux, similar closeness and wit of percep­tion,
that same hovering tenderness--though here at a
more austere removal--and altogeth~r less smartness,
17ss f~nicky clutching at tidy moralisms and thera­pies.
If Lawler could be put in the same circle as Miller, Odets,
and Chayefsky, and if his writing has continued to ,be
categorized among the best, then the real problem must have
been a cultural chasm between•America and Australia : Bruce
Grant tried to define this chasm in Adult Educations
I do not think Americans would understand the
social character of Barney and Roo ••• the dignity
which Lawler gave Barney and Roo. · It would possibly
take an historian to explain this aqequately but we can
observe the surface effects. I feel sure no American
audience would appreciate Roo's shame at being forced
to work in a factory; in addition ~is life with Barney
has a gallantry which Americans, inclined to regard
their itinerant workers as hobos evading responsibility
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# ' (such as the pursuit of success) · would not easily
understand. ,
A play which quie't f y chronicles the unheroic
thought 8.!}d gestures of men and women who have no c
intention of resigning from society, no urge to sui­cide,
no desire ~o martyr themselves for the sake of
their souls or the future of their. civilization, would
seem tame after the run-of guilt, frustration--and
great t+agedy--which Broadway had in the post-war
years. The · vigours of The Doll could not save it, 11he
r Ameriei\{1 theatre has had no lack of vigour itself.
Perhaps .Ame.zJ.cans could not ~asp the full meaning in The
j ,.
Doll because of these cultural problems, but this first
attempt at bringing it to American audiences was fortunately
not the last.
In 1968 .the Negro Ensembl..e Company in New York City was
looking for an international work to use as its second pro­duction
of its first season. They chose The Doll. Adapting
the script to suit themselves, they set the action in New
Orleans and the cane cutters became migrant farm workers.
Dialogue was appropriately altered to include American Negro
vernacular rather than the Australian, ~ut the events were
all the same. Clive Barnes of the New York Time~ound a
new universality in this approach,
·This was always a well-crafted, interesting play,
but one short of distinction in its writing, and it is
therefore no great loss when the dialogue {with I think
only minor local amendme~ts) has been adapted for an
American cast. What is interesting is how well the
play's ethos matches its new American milieu--Australia
and America have a great deal in common in their fron­tier
aspirations. But, even more, in its exploration
of the snow slopes of yesterday, the pla¥Wf~ght is
touching a humanity that is co,mmon to all.
'
It may have tak~n transpos~ng the events .and characters into
an American framework to get Americans to take notice and
see the true beauty and meaning of The Doll, but .there was
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Mean.jin,· Sept._ 1957, pp. 295-6.
12 Ibid., P• 295.
JO
13 Richard Watts, Jr., '!An Honest Drama from Austra­lia,
" ~_rev. of Summer of the S_eventeenth Doll, by Ray Law~er,
t
New York Pos , 23 Jan. 1958, n. pag.; rpt. in New York
Theatre Critics' Reviews, 195~, p. 390.
14 John Chapma· n, " .'Summer of the Seventeenth Doll' Out
of .,Xhis World Linguistically," rev. of Summer of the Seven­teenth
Doll, by Ray Lawler, Daily News (New York), 23 Jan.
1958, n. pag.; rpt. in ibid.
15 Marya Mannes, Theater, "Sugar Cane and Kewpie
Dolls," rev. of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, by Ray
Lawler, Reporter, 6 Mar. 1958, p. 36.
16 Richard Hayes, The Stage, "The Disguises of Love,"
rev. of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll,, by Ray Lawler,
Commonweal, 67 (21 Feb. 1958), 54o.
17 Bruce Grant, rev. of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll,
by Ray Lawler, Adult Education, 2 (Mar. 1958), n. pag.,
cited by Rees, .p. 473.
18 Clive Barnes, Theater• "'Summer of 17th Doll' by
Negro Ensemble," rev. of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, by
Ray Lawler, New York Times, 21 Feb. 1968, p • . 59.
19 "Sleeper," rev. of "Season of Passion," dir. by
Leslie Norman, Newsweek, 8 Jan. 1962, p • • 64.
20 Guthrie Worley, "Major Play .Given in a Minor Key,"
rev. of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll ,-by Ray L~wler,
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Theatre Australia, Feb. 1979t. p. JJ.
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CHAPTER J
The Bushman and Ife'treat from Realism
I
. r ·_After' he~ mpressive Broadway run of Summer of the
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'--
Seventeenth Doll Lawler did not return to his homeland. He
lived in Ireland and sometimes Kent with his wife and twin
children. He was riding high on a crest of popularity, both
public and critical; but as Leslie Rees said in his book
The Making of Australian Drama, his writing appetite was ;
only whetted,
The Doll continued to bring him fame and to be
produced in more and more countries, and he could pro­bably
have lived off -the returns from even modest per­formances
indefinitely. But a playwright's aim is to
write plays; with most it is a compulsion. Lawler's
particular obligation to~ himself was to write plays
that would be both import~ and popular, this being
the lead given by The Doll.
Out of this writing hunger came Law~er's next play, The Pic­cadilly
Bushman. Drawing from his own very recent experi­ences
in Australia and England, Lawler created an ' intri­guing,
albeit peculiar, character study. Critics expected
• much of this man· who had brou~ht Australian drama to the
forefront of international attention. Those who praised its
initial production found themselves eating their words after
closer scrutiny. However, its dramatic thinn~ss is compen­sated
by its insightful sociological implications. -
In The Piccadilly Bushman Lawler turned from attacking
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national myths 0£ mateship an~ the outback -to \ft~cking the
~ ~- con£licting relationship bet~en Australia and England. He
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the sentimental attachment many Australians felt to
England as cultural and moral guide, as well as the conde-scending
atti tud_e many British had toward Australian "colo-nials."
England a
experience 6n stage as an actor, and in
expatriate playwright, gave him the rational'
f
and emotional starting point for his play. The story
involves an Australian actor who has returned from England
after ten years to star in the film version of a popular
Australian novel. There are actually two story lines. The
f-irst concerns this actor, Alec Ritchie, trying to cope with
the novelist, the scriptwriter, and the director. A second
subplot concerns Alec's attempts to resolve his tempestuous
marriage to Meg. In both we see Alec disowning everything
Australian within him. All action takes place in a
fashionable home off Sydney harbor. ,
As the play opens a press ~arty for returning actor
Alec Ritchie is just finishing. His press agent and friend,
Grace Clive, indicates from the beginning bitternes£ toward
an artist who made his success in England before returning
to a land he has grown away frim,
ALEC, How did it go?
GRACE, In the words of a vernac~lar you!ve probably
forgotten--bloody bottlipg.
But Alec hardly needs reminding that- he ,is misplaced. As
his plane landed in Syd~ey he felt so terrified he could
hardly move. He wondered just how he wopld fit in a£ter
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such a long abs~nce. We see ithe real. depth of his separa-
~ tion from his homeland when he asks about Grace'~ husband
Harry, who was once his closest friend. Grace tells Alec
that Harry has been dead for three years. The· gulf is so
wide that he even forgets his closest friends. Later he
ridicules \.his Yanngoola-born··wife by reproducing her ace-ants
Well, at's how it is. 0 Yanngoolal What a name. ~t
reall needs the accent to get the full ugly flavour,
doesn't it? (He reprodu~es it with bitter accuracy.)
Meet the missus. Comes .from Yanngoola. Town's a bit
on the small side, of course, just the one street and
them flamin' great red plains, but we do all right.
- What country, y'know, and we got Quite a reputation
for breedin' bitch bound wimmen--j
Alec's roots lie deep, he c~ll mimic his native accent.
n his tirade we learn that his wife Meg was sent home a
year earlier because she could not stop having one night
stands with various "down and out" men. She and Chris, the
Ritchie's son, have been living in Yanngoola, and her
arrival in Sydney is the first meeting , the Ritchies have had
in over a year. Unknown to Meg, Alec plans to take their
small son back to England, with or without her, when the
filming is finished. .
As the first act continues, the rest of the characters
are introduced. Isabel and Lew Leggat, the wealthy couple • .
who regard England as "home" even though they are native
Australians, have loaned their home to Alec i;md Meg. They
come bustling in to rub elbows with the famous actor who is
returning home from the "mother country. :· Finally we meet
Stuart Allingham, the scriptwriter; · Douglas O'Shea,· the
novelist; an'1 Vincent Franklin, the dir~ctor. O'Shea com-
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plains that Stuart has changed his navel f,jm an honest tale
of fundamental loneliness i rf the outback to a mere adventure
yarn drained of all meaning. H€ feels a kinship to Meg as
he refers to the scripts
Have y~u read this? (Meg shakes her head without
'looking to ·see what it ·is. But even this is encow;zage­
·ment or O'Shea and he streams on like a fresh breeze.)
I tell you, a man's mad.· He makes up his mind when
he's kid that he want~ to write. The only way he '
feels he can get his hantts on the sense of his own
little hunk of the world, see. So he puts aside every­thing
that's likely to get in the way of this, and for
years he works until at last he manages to produce a
book that comes pretty close to it. You know the first
thing he does after that? He sells the film rights to
a bunch of Pommies who turn the whole thing upside down
and drain all the sense and meaning out of it again.
(He tosses 4he script o·n to the table.) A man is stark
raving madl
O'Shea counts on fellow-countryman Alec to back him up in
his protests. As the act closes, Alec has decided that he
will support O'Shea, and a meeting is called.
In the second act Alec, Grace, Vincent, and O'Shea are
waiting for Stuart to show up at the m~eting to discuss
script changes which will make it closer to the novel's ori­ginal
intent. Stuart has obviously delayed his arrival
because he is hostile to any changes made in his gcript.
Alec, Vincent, and O'Shea launch into a discussion of Aus-
• tralian culture, highlighted by Alec's playing a record he
made in England for his son dealing with aboriginal stories.
One story goes as follows,
•
In the beginning, before the fbrst'dreaJ!l time, all life
was held by the great spirit, Mywilbra, and the face of
the earth ·was empty like smoke.. Then came the first
dream time, and in her dreaming, Mywilbra moved up out
of the darkness and made all things. Mother she was to
the wide rivers and the silver fish, to the . tall trees
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and rocks ·and the quain:t little ·furr;yWanima:).s they
sheltered, and mother -to· the black men that she spread
all over the ·land. And .. when Mywilbra looked at what,.
she had done, she saw that it was a perfect pattern of
her dreaming, and she asked herself what she could do
to be sure that all things would be at the end as they
were at the making. So. this one Mywilbra, she took the
spirit of each thing she had created and tied the long­.
est hair o·t its head to the place where it belonged.
:That · s why, as every little piccaninny knows, when all
things die--no matter how far they may have wandered in
the'r ime--the spi~it i~ able to find its way back ,to
its arting place.
O'Shea finally cannot take what he feels is a parody of
na-tive Australians and he tears the needle off the record, damaging it. Despite this outburst, Vincent offers O'Shea
an advisory position with the film, and Alec persuades him
to accept. Finally Stuart arrives, he has been on a fishing
trip with the Leggats. The three men are angry with Stuart,
but the Leggats take the blame for his being late and try to
bolster his position by downgrading O'Shea and Au~tralia in
general, as follows,
ISABEL, ••• If you ask me, I
this Australian .author far
ALEC, Mrs. Leggat--
,
think you're taking
too seriously.
ISABEL, No, I mean it. After all, what's our literary
standing out here? And as Stuart said when he
· told us about it-- •
STUART, (not totally annoyed that the quip should be
aired) Isabel, this is neither the time nor the
place--
ISABEL, But, my dear, ~t's so true! He said .that this
man--what's his name--O'Shea--that he throws the
English language around as though it were a boom­erang
that he wasn't particularly .anxious to have
returned. Now isn't that true? And isn't it
typical? ••• You mustn't think that I've any~
thing against you as an author, it's just that I
never read any books written locally at all. Just
as I never listen to the voices out here if I can
help. It's ·a matter of standards really. We were
given a mother tongue, and I think those of us who
appreciate it have an obligation to keep it as
decent as possible. By reaaing decently written
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books and speaking ,it dgcently olrselves. If you
understand what I ~~an. - Hearing a discrepancy in Isabel .'s pronunciation of the words
"salt" and "bream, 11 0 'Shea turns the tables on· her a
O'SHEA, What did you say the average man was?
ISABEL, · I . said he was -supposed to be the salt of the
:· arth. ,,
O'SHEA Not according to the decent Englishman,he
i 't. At a stretch, he might be the salt of the
arth, Mrs. Le~at, but the salt--no. (Her jaw
drops a little.) Just as the first fish you
caught this morning was a bream to you, but its
soul mate was a bream to your friend.
(In these repetitions, O'SHEA contrasts the
upper-class English pronunciation of the
words with ISABEL'S ren~ition of the fairly
accepted Austral norm.)
The Leggats, especially Isabel, are embarrassed by this
attack and leave. The silence is broken by the entrance of
the servant Corcoran, who brings in a plate of cleaned bream
and uses normal Australian pronunciation to describe them.
Attention is then directed toward Stuart, who has left the
others waiting for over an hour. He is reprimanded by
Vincent. Angry when he hears that O'.Shea is being given a
position of some authority in the film, Stuart tells O'Shea
and Alec that the reason he was ~late is that Vincent told
him that the meeting was not to be taken seriously anyway,
but was only to placate O'Shel. Vincent breaks in by saying
that since Stuart is irresponsible, he decided to in fact
give the Australian novelist a real voice in the filming.
O'Shea watches the bickering for a ·while, then tells a long
story which parallels ~lee's recording of an aboriginal
myth, but in terms of British and colon..i al history. It goes
as follows,
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In the beginning, they ,say, before t first dream
time, way up in the No~ h Sea there was this young
white witch very virginal ahd remote. Wrapped around
with mist and very, very inscrutable. Then came the
dream time, and in her dreaming she broke through the
veil that held her and. set out to create -a world for
herself. The only thing she had to help ~er was a
certain magic. Nothing 'black or nasty, you know, she
-wouldn't put herself under any obligation. It was
.more ike - -card tricks 'than anything else. Yeh, tfiat
was i She was the gr~atest somnambulistic card
J8
-plaier of her day. No stakes were too high, bluff was
too olg. So pretty soo she started to collect her
world. Not all at once : it wasn't easy, there were
other players in the dr.eam almost as good as she was.
But an island here, a continent there, a desert in the
sun, a patch in the shade--gradually it all mounted up.
I might mention that in the process of all this she'd
rather lost that remote virginal look, and standing at
the back of her chair, watching her shuffle the cards,
were some of the most illegitimate looking kids you
ever saw in your life. But that was all right too, she
had a use even for these, ·and one by one she packed
them off to take possession of her winnings. Some went
with shiny faces, thinking they were being rewarded,
others with a hangdog look, knowing it was likely to be
hell. But all of them had one thing in common, a lo~
long string that stretched all the way back to Mothers
diamond-studded apron. Well cards went down -and time
went on, and in far away places, the kids put her pic­ture
under their pillow and dreamed nostaligically of
home. Until at last came the day, when the pattern of
the world she had set out to create for herself was
complete. There it was, ever P>esent und~r the sun;
and at the sight of it, she became aware for the first
time of how tired she was. "Play a few games without
me," she told the boys in the back room. "I want to
spend some time with the kids. " And oddly enough, when
she sat down to think about it, that's exactly what she
did want to do. So out went the invitations to a Great ·
Big Home to Mother Week, and back they came from every
point of the compass, tit'mbling over one anothe-r with
excitement. Very amusing it was to see them with their
rough hands and rusty manners, wearing the wrong sort
of clothes, and crowding around to stare at her with
all the old adoration. Sitting that night at the head
of the magnificent family dinner she had arranged for
them she watched them fumbling their way among the
golden cutlery and felt patronising_ly fond of them. A
little contemptuoμs too, perhaps, but quite fond. On
an impulse she rose to her fee·t, intending to ·deliver
an address of welcome, and it was only then that she
realised, looking down on them, t lfat there wasn't one
of them who wasn't busting out of the apron· strings
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that· she had so carefully attached t them. Immedi­ately
everything that . lmd seemed strange and amusing
about them a minute ago now became intolerable, and
without hesitation, instead of the speech of welcome~
she lashed out at them with all the icy bitchiness she
could muster. Individually she told them every shame­ful
detail of their bir_-tp, collectively she· informed
them of how second rate ·they had become since leaving
.her presenqe. And then, in the full grossness of her
_'anci~nt breeding, she walked out on them. U~ortun­ately,
however, she hadn't counted on one thing. So
io h d it been since they parted from her that only
one them, the youngesrt of the family, had under-stood
a single word she ' said. With the result that no
sooner had the double door closed behind her than a
great buzz arose as they congratulated themselves.
"What a speech of welcome," they cried. "How well
Mamma said we were, how well born and how handsome."
Till a small voice from the far erid of the table spoke
up and said, "That's what you bastards think." And in
the silence that followed, you could hear a number of
little sounds that could have been the b~aking of
hearts or the snapping of ·apron strings.
O'Shea says he hopes his story will "get everyone straight
about their native fables." His white witch of the north,
which is a counterpart of Alec's Mywilbra, is Eng~and.
The illegitimate children sent all over the world are the
I colonies. The three men sit through this long-winded
speech, but their reactions are very different. Stuart
admires it, Vincent puts up with it because he expected it
of a colonial, but Alec is infuriated by it. He decides to
break off all ties with O'Shea, asking Vincent to back off
•
from his offer to make O'Shea consultant. The three men
leave with the resolve that O'Shea is to have no voice in
the film·. Meg, feeling that O'Shea is crushed by the rejec­tion,
eq>lains to him why she had affairs with so many men
in England1
That first one? He was the first . y'know--of, a long
time. Three or four months at lea~t. After that they
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... - i . i 4o came easier and went qui' c' ker. r .&ot ·so that I could
spot t~em, you see_, a .mJ.le off. You called · 'em guests
at _ a witch's party, but-· i can get closer than that.
You lnow .what they are really? Chickens come to roo8t •
All their little lives they've heard stories of this
high and mighty roost, and eventually they've ha4 to
make the long trip back to see if they can't fly up
there and crow their heart out. And some of them
actually make it. Alec, for instance. He crows with
-~he best of them. But ·for every one that's accept~d
-up o the perch, there's a thousand scratching around
at the ottom of it. They'll never be part of the
priz-e lock, but they 're all too blind or proud or '
silly to know it, ands ewhere--hemmed in among that
mob--that's where you'll find me. Close . to some very
funny neighbours sometimes. Oh, very funny. There
was this American writer, lived in a four-hundred-year­old
house, and never wrote anything that came later
than sixteen hundred, he explained it to me once.
"What you get up to isn't love," he said, "it's a hud­dling
together of the rejected." I wonder what Alec
would think of that? N·ot viciousness, love, I wasn't
picking up misfits for the hell of9it, it was just a-­huddling
together of the rejected·.
Meg offers herself to O'Shea because she thinks he is one of
the rejected, but he refuses to be considered a misfit and
tells .her that she need not feel she is one either.
In the third act Alec and Grace ar, e waiting for Meg and
O'Shea to come home. It is later the same evening and they
have been gone all day. Alec assumes t ey are off making
love. W~ile they wait, Stuart comes in to tell Alec that he
and Vincent have decided to let O Shea help rework the
script after all. Their acc~tance of O'Shea, and thus of
Australia on its terms, disturbs Alec even more. When Meg
and O'Shea arrive with aboriginal artifacts for the
Ritchie's s~n, Alec and Grace confront them. Grace says she
is going to act as witness to Meg's aduitery so that Alec
r,
can get custody of Chris and take him back to England.
- Grace has blamed Meg for not telling Alec about ~arry's
....
-~
death, and she is paying her But Meg tells her the
truths . :,.
All this ·arternoon I have been under wide skies with
strong sunlight and shlll,l> rocks. I'm not going to have
any fuzzy outlines now. (to ALEC) It is true that
since I saw you this moP»ing, I have made a pass at
this gentl~man, but this~-(Her repetition of the term
~akes two tender words ·of it.)--gentle man turned me
down=t. That clears '-my conscience. Now I'm goihg
to cle yours. (to GRACE) We were living outside
Str d when we got the cable about Harry's death.'
Alec was rehearsing at ~e time. I rang the theatre
and on about the third try I got through to him. I
read him the cable, there was a pause, then he said
"Blast." Then another pause and he said, "Well, what
_ do you expect me to do about it?" and he hung up the
phone. So I cabled flowers from the two of us and sent
the message you got. Three or four weeks later, you
wrote an acknowledgement. It arrived when we were at
breakfast. Alec had the day off, and it was rather
late in the morning. I passed your letter across to
him, he looked at the handwriting, turned to the last
page to see the signature, then folded the letter and
pushed it back across the table to me. He didn't read
it then or at any other time. Or f5fer to it again in
any way. And that is God's truth.
Grace realizes her mistake in trusting Alec. She and her
husband were part of a past he tried to, forget. Feeling
betrayed and bitter, she slaps him hard across the face and
walks out. Alec then turns to~ and O'Shea and explains
why he did what he did1
I loathe and detest this country with everything that's
in me. How many different ways would you like to hear
me say it? I never belo;iged here. This is the prison
in which I spent my first twenty-four years--the sunlit
ro~k OY½_fhich I sweated until at last I found a way of
escape.
That way of escape was through Me_g, for in marrying her h~
got a trip t"o England from her father as a dowry. He used
, her to get to B·ngland, . and then found he' could never really
fit in there, like the children in O'S11._ea's white witch
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story. · After Alec leaves, Meg admi.· to O''Shea that she
. ..,. .
felt th~ s,ame way her husband : did about Australia and Eng-.. -
land, or thought she did, but because she was not strong
enough to try to adapt like ·~~m, she classed herself as a
fail~e and started clinging to other rejects and failures
for
. "
She says to O'Sheas
You~ w why I went down .the gutter in London? Beca'u se
in my heart I was certai that all the changes Alec was
making in himself were right. Even though I hated
them, I had enough of t~e poison in me to be1ieve in
what he was doing. But! couldn't match him in it, so
- I tossed myself in with what I thought were the other
failures. Failures. My Godl I had the biggest one of
~he1~ot in my arms all tne time and I didn't even know
l. t.
After clinging to failures for comfort for years, Meg real­izes
with O'Shea's help that she is married to one who needs
her help. Negative as it seems, Meg and Alec appear in the
end of the play to have a chance at their marriage because
Meg sees that he needs her.
In The Piccadilly Bushman Lawler ~ain uses his char­acters
to depict stereotypes. The difference is that in The
Doll he shows characters he had observed from the outside,
in The Piccadilly Bushman he shows characters drawh from his
own experience in the theatre. Expatriate actor Alec
• Ritchie is like many artists from Australia at the time,
especially actors and playwrights, who gained no home recog­nition
until they had made a success abroad. This success·,
elusive as it is, comes at a price; as 'Alec says to Mega
, Three generationst And how many of the hundreds of
generations that went to the making of me do you think
were born over there? Do you imagine all those centur­ies
viving can be lost and forgo~ten in three short .
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gener·ations? (She crumples dclm to a seat, her head
turned away from him, a:rld. he moves in for the kill.)
You don't have to hide your face from me, I'm no
special--freak. There are .plenty of my sort out here,
the throwbacks. But mos:t of them manage to make an
adjustment. Most of them. The rest of us fight tooth
and nail for the happy ohance of becoming an expatri­ate.
Do you know what that means? Expatriate--the man
who can ·never accept his own country, and finds that
the c]itry he hankers after never accepts himl If· you
ever w t reveng~ for the. fact that I married1~ou as I
did, o don't have to go past that one wordl '
4
As an expatriate, Alec has tried to suppress everything Aus-tralian
within him and out of this has come frustration and
dislllusionment. Finally realizing he has no place to
belong, he becomes a fit companion for Meg, who has loved
him and tried to a point to go along with his Anglophile
obssession. Meg is content being a normal Australian woman
raising her child in Yanngoola; it is Alec who longs for a
life he cannot have.
Vincent, the film's director, is a typical "Pommy" who
looks down on Australia as being hopeloosly "colonial,"
though he would not openly admit it. Stuart betrays a con­fidence
by exposing Vincent's true attitudes
I was in the head office when he insisted on the entire
film unit bei~ sent out from England. I'd never feel
easy working with Colonials, he said. When it comes to
the point, there's something1ijo awfully second-rate
about even the best of tiem. ·
Vincent's condescending outlook on Australians is contrasted
by the no less downgrading idealism' Stuart shows; as O'Shea
points outs
Serious? rGod Almighty, that's the whole point, he's
starry eyed. (He waves the sc·ript.) There's not a
person in this who's under ten feet tall, and that
includes the women, and they all walk around wearing
great big hats and stiff upper lips, and shooting from
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the hip. Even the kang¥oos
44
. · 15 e bloody man ·eaters.
In Stuart and Jincent we have two extreme ·British attitude's
toward Australia. In Lew an~ Isabel Leggat we see an Aus-
--~. tralian attitude toward England.
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The Leggats · refer to England as home even though they
\,.
are from pioneer Australian stock. Their tena- ,
'--­cious
clinging to England as t he "mother land" and their
rejection of anything Australian within them and around them
pra.Yides some of the lighter comic moments of the play, as
in the following exchange,
ISABELa (dangerously) Are you suggesting that I have
0 an Australian accent? .
O'SHEAa Hasn't anyone ever told you?
ISABEL I They have not I On the other hand, I 've been
mistaken as English repeatedly all over the world.
O'SHEA, Places like Chicago and C8.f8blanca maybe?
ISABELa No. In places that count.
Infuriated when even Stuart, after all the kindness she has
shown him, admits that she does have a ,s light accent, Isabel
is completely humiliated and turns on her husbands
LEW1 Belle, I won't have any interference.
ISABEL, (stamping her foot) My name is Isabell
LEW, (less forcefully) I know. But I--I'm upset.
ISAB&i1 So am I. Sick to death of these flashbacks of
yours to the smelting works at B.H.P. My house-­Belle--
is it any wonder that people criticize our
accents? •
LEW1 That was my fault, I suppose?
ISABELa (in swift attack) I am judged by association.
As I have been socially for years, from here to-­garden
parties at Cambridge.
LEW1 Oh, no--
ISABEL, You may very well say oh no.
LEW, Tnat lousy, rainy garden party.
ISABEL I Call it whatever you like. , But just remember
it wai:in't until you opene~ your mouth that anyone
there mentioned kookaburras. .
LEW, All rightl (generally, with.great distinctness)
I'm sorry. I apologize for my manners, . my accent, .
that I happen to own this house·, and that I'm
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unf'ortunate enough to~~ in 17 But at least,
that' ~ some thing I can re!Dledy.
_45
Isabel cannot stand the feeling ·that she is being laughed at
by friends in England, or that her husband is offending
their _British guests now with his accent or by his referring
..
to the hou they have loaned the Ritchies as his house.
ogizes to Stuart ~or the good time they had
I
while fishings
ISABELa Goodness, you've no idea how sorry we are
- about that nasty little scene. It was our fault,
you know--oh yes, it wast Lew and I have talked
it over, and he's agreed that from now on there
are to be no more fishing trips while we're enter­taining
overseas guests.
STUART I Really?
ALECa I think that's rather a mistake.
ISABELa (definitely) Oh, no. It creates quite the
wrong sort of atmosphere, you see. Particularly
for Lew. He goes racketing around out there and
then comes in full of excitement and sea air and
behaves like--Well, you saw for yourself.
STUARTa (restrainedly) Isabel, would it make ·any dif­ference
at all if r were to tell you that it's a
long time since I've admired anyone as much as I
did you two this morning wherf those damned sharks
arrived? The fact that you didn't turn a hair
when the first one tore the catch almost out of
your hand as you reeled it in, and the way Lew
leant over and smacked that other great brute as
_it bumped itself against the launch?
ISABELa (triumphantlf) But that's what I mea.tl. Smack­ing
sharkst Don t you see? It's--It's overdonet
I told him. Stream fishing is what you people are
used to, that has s~yle and some form to it.18What
we get up to is just open water larrikinism.
She cannot even accept a compliment from an Englishman on
any aspect of her Australian life. She is content to live ·
her life in Australia with some concessions, such as going
, fishing with he'i:' husband in the ope.n sea and fighting off
sharks, as long as no English see her doing it. These
rather comic examples show the pathetic relationship some
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{ Australians have to England whe they do not accept their
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own country and its uniqueness, but try to copy the land 8'f
their ancestors.
In each of these characters Lawler has illustrated and
to some degree attacked an afU)ect of Australian society and
\.
culture, er from within or without. But in the char-acter
of O'Shea, the rugged b~sh novelist, he attacks no
one, but makes us see where the compromise lies. In the
final scene he comforts Meg by referring back to Alec's
record about aboriginal mythology. Before he poked fun at
it, now he is being sincere and insightful1
Well, there it is. (broodingly) Bloody old Mywilbra,
she's the one. She takes the longest hair of the
spirit and ties it to the place where it belongs. Only
sometimes she goes past where she should and hitches it
way back on to--I dunno--some race memory, I suppose.
And then you've got yourself a real full blooded mis-fit.~
. .
He brings together the two cultures, w,h ite and black, old
world· and new, when he explains Alec's hankering after Eng-land
by using the old black legends1 he is tied to a race
memory, a tie that takes him all the way back through the
generations to the land of his fathers. In the final lines
O'Shea goes on to tell Meg1 •
What do you want me to say? That it's all a matter of
time? That there'll come a day out here when we'll
stop looking back over our shoulder and , accept what's
under our feet? ••• She'a a heartbreaking country,.
Meggie. I don't think she ever offered much in the way
of easy comfort. (Something in the abject lines of her
body touches him. He picks up an opject from among the
aboriginal pieces . and brings it to her.) (with rough
jocular tenderness) Here--a message stick. !~'s sup­posed
to keep you safe in strange ,:territory.
Here finally Lawler shows us the ideal Australian, the one
- ..
-: that is going to emerge out of
. ·ecially since I lived in Eng­land.
And .it won't be about physical matters, but
about the stresses of buj.lding up life and a career .in
anoth~country, even when you're successful to begin
with. nd I'll show how ·for the Australian artist in
part ar, a man is alw~s torn between Australia, '
which feeds his sense of ~:'belonging, and Europe, where
the contemporary life is real an~3glamorous but isn't
really part of him, or he of it.
Th&&e ideas had been developed before in Australian novels,
but The Piccadilly Bushman is the first major stage play to
involve them. It is a negative theme and not appealing to
most audiences. Only intellectuals are lik~ly to understand
and empathize with it, because they are living it. The main
character, Alec, is believable enough, but he has no redeem­ing
qualities to balance his anti-Australian feelings or the
fact that he used his wife as a steppillfo stone to England.
Wal Cherry criticized all the characters·1
The weakness of the play lies in the well-founded
Australian phrase--'we couldn't care less.' If a play
sets .out to deal with national generalisations, its
characters must be representative and its impact must
depend on our recognition of the characters and their
behaviour. The Englishmen in this play are neither
good generalisations nor , finely observed individuals.
They are stock. The Australians iμ-e, without excep­tion.,
a hopelessly rarefied specfes. We appreciate,
therefore, the qualities of the author's work, which
are numerous, but we cannot appreciate wha~ all the
fuss is about. Lawler never .made up his mind whethez4
he was ~iting about countrie~ or individual people.
The characters ,...,i n The Piccadilly Bushman . are too specialized
for any general audience to accept ·them or their problems.
Most Australians did not care about the issues the play
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raised, and even fewer non-Atlstralians fo~nd them interest-
" -: ing • .,.
Lawler's ·next important -wo~k, The Unshaven Cheek, was
never produced in Australia. · It was seen only once, at the
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Edinburgh Festival in 1963. Lawler himself withdrew it, and
copie's of
public.
script have never been made available. to the
iting this play;Lawler apparently was moving
(
away 'from realism. Critic~ cpmpared The Unshaven Cheek to
an Arthur Miller play with its use of space setting and var­iea
time frame. Thematically, Lawler reminded the audience
of values an industrial society may often forget. This he
did through the person of a cooper, or maker of barrels.
This cooper told a young visitor about his craft and his
past experiences, seen in a series of flashbacks by the
audience. As T. C. Worsley wrote in the New York Times,
this 6pened the young man's eyes,
But hearing the old man's aceounts of his trade
_and his union battles, the young man becomes fired by
his ideas, and has the wits to perceive that though the
particular satisfaction the old craftsman got from his
work may now be irrecoverable, the attitude that pro-25 duced this satisfaction can and must be rediscovered.
This idea may be intriguing, but unfortunately thi plot was
contrived, as Worsley went on to say, • .
The play has large and obvious flaws--in particu­lar,
the middle act is conducted in a series of long
realistic flashbacks that do not at all. 2gme off,
either in the writing or the production.
Lawler obviously shared the same impression this critic had.
The Unshaven Cheek has not been heard from since its one
short run.
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Lawler's attempt at Mi]tler's style did. not s~cceed the
. ~
~ first time~ but nine years lat er he retreated even farthe ¾..
from realism in his The Man wno Shot the Albatross, and pro­duced
his most important work.after The Doll. Lawler even
flew home from Ireland to Melbourne to attend the premiere
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of this pla by the Melbourne .Theatre Company. He took as
his m~in cliaracter Captain Wi~liam Bligh of the Bounty, ,.
later a governor of New South Wales. Mary Lord described
the- productions As the title suggests, the play explores the
effects of the mutiny on Bligh's personality when he is
once again in a position of considerable authority over
, a faction-ridden community. Lawler here abandons the
conventional realistic setting for a skeletal arrange­ment
of rostrums on several levels, which allows great
fluidity in the action. The play moves backwards and
forwards through a number of scenes both present and
past and in and out of Bligh's mind which is haunted by
memories of the mutiny and fantasies surrounding it.
This is a play of considerable power and psychological
penetration, factually accurate, exploring but .not
r 7solvi~7one of Australia's most enigmatic historical
figures. ,
~
Superb acting combined with Lawler's _masterful ability to
write authentic dialogue made The Man Who Shot the Albatross
the playwright's second greatest success. It play~d also in
Canberra, was revised in Ireland, and was later presented in
Sydney and at the Adelaide Fe«tival in 1972.
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Notes
1 Rees, The Making of Australian Drama (Sydney,
Angus· and.Ji ertson, 1973), p. 290.
I 2 Ray Lawler, The Picoadilly Bushman (London, Angus
and Robertson, 1961), p. 9.
- 3 Ibid. , p. 21 •
4 Ibid., JJ-4. PP•
5 Ibid., PP• 61-2.
6 Ibid., PP• 69-70.
7 Ibid., P• 70.
8 Ibid., pp. 79-81.
9 Ibid., P• 85.
10 Ibid., P• 102. I
11 Ibid., p. 104.
12 Ibid., P• 107.
13 Ibid., P• 105.
14 Ibid., pp. 77-8.
15 Ibid., PP• 38-9.
16 Ibid., 70. P•
17 Ibid., PP• 7J-4.
18 Ibid·., pp. 94-5.
19 Ibid.,.,...,p. 107 • .
20 Ibid., pp. 108-9.
21 Rev. of The Piccadilly Bushman, by Ray Lawler,
51
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52
Times (London), 14 Sept ~. 1~~. p. 5.
22 .Li'ndsay Browne, "To Slum or Not to Slum," in Aust?"B.­lian
Theatre Year 1959-60 (Sydney, n.p., 1960), p. 51.
2J Rees, p. 297.
~4 Wal Cherry 1 "The Picc.adilly Bushman and Prisoner: s
Country," re s. of The Piccadilly Bushman, by Ray Lawler, ,
• l
and Prisoner's Country, by V ce Palmer, Meanjin, Mar. 1960,
P• 93°
_ 25 T. C. Worsley, "Lawler' s 'Unshaven Cheek' Staged at
Edinburgh 1 " rev. of The Unshaven Cheek I by Ray Lawler,
New York Times, 20 Aug. 196)~ p. J8.
26 Ibid.
27 Mary Lord, "Lawler, Ray(mond Evenor)," in Contempor­ary
Dramatists, ed. James Vinson (New Yorks St. Martin's
Press, 1977), pp. 468-9.
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CHA.P.T.E R 4
The Trilogy
Wher'ea Ray Lawler had b, en retreating farther and far­ther
away from realism sinc·e Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
and The Piccadilly Bushman with The Unshaven Cheek and The - Man Who Shot the Albatross, in 1975 he stepped back into
that mode and back to the characters of The Doll. He
decided to make The Doll third in a set of plays he called
The Doll Trilogy, and so he went back to write the first and
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second of the series. He explained why h~ chose to go back-wards
in times
There were probably a couple of reasons, one was
that I left Australia in 1957 and 1I was away just on
twenty years. I am a grass roots writer and what hap­pened
in the time I was away was that gradually I lost
touch with Australia and the type of Australian I knew
and it was quite impossible for me to write a play
about modern Australia, so I was in rather a cleft
stick I suppose, because I didn't feel I could write
about the countries I was living in. I was enjoying it
but I didn't ever feel that I was part of the scene
there, and when I was looking for things to write about
Australia I realised I weuld have to project b~ckwards
if I was going to write about what I knew and this
would be one of tht things I suppose in setting the
trilogy backwards.
And so Lawler turned to the recent past because that was the
Australia he . knew. But why did he choose to add to a play
he had written over twenty years ea_rlier? It was dangerous
to do anything with a work that had achi eved a revered posi­tion
in Australian dramatic circles and was to most of the
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{ the world the only Austr~ t~p play it had ever seen or read.
~ Many feilow playwrights had attempted to copy its style af\d
pattern, ~ith almost universal failure. Unti~ now Lawler
had refused to imitate himsel~. But these were his char­acter.
a, and he felt there was something more for them t ~
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So
When The Doll came -bn and ran for a time people
were asking all sorts ·o:f questions such as "well now
it's 1953 and they've been going for seventeen years-­what
happened to them during the war," for instance,
- which I had rationalised in my mind to a certain
extent, I knew but I didn't think anybody would ask the
qu~, and I thought "oh yes, I see that" and then
people would ask "what ~o the dolls mean?" and so on,
and in the end there were so many bits and pieces that
I felt I hadn't got quite -enough about the characters
or perhaps that I hadn't handled them sufficiently well
in The Doll that I needed to say something more. Nancy
for instance, was a character that everybody used to ,
ask about because they talk about Nancy in The Doll ~
over and over until people are either fed up with he
or they wanted to know more about her, and to me the
writing of the other two plays was well wor~h while
merely :for creating the c:~ acter of Nancy • .
he chose again to speak through Roo : Barney, Olive, Emma ,
Bubba, and now Nancy, and he was also going back to a time
he could remember, the time of his childhood. He also chose
to take these people back in time because he could' not see
any real future in their lives after 1955; as he explained,
• I don't think there is any future for those people
after the break-up in The· Doll. They really had
reached the end of the line and this is one of 'the rea­sons
why I have never seen the film that was made of
the play because I believe there was a possibility
there of a happy ending and I .can't see any chance of a
happy ending for them whatsoeve-r, 'and to have gone on
and -to follow them into disillusionment I don't know
that it would have interest~~ me very much. I would
have had to split up very deffnitely the areas to -fol­low
Roo and Barney and I always fel.t that Roo and Bar­ney
would drift apart eventually because the thing that
had held them together to some extent was the relation-
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ship ·down in Melbou1re, ·and Barn~y had reacl'\ed a stage
in his life when he was~taking a different track. Roo,
I should imagine would b~ a much more bitter man thal).
he was so there's no real future in that. I wasn't
interested in seeing Olive .withering with Emma sitting
by moaning, and I felt ,there was sufficient said at the
end of The Doll for anyqqdy to visualize what happened
to the people and in the · idea of taking it backwards I
thought· I'd. left a number of things unexplained and
~exp ored and f~r this 'reason it was worth while
going ckwards.
the first of the ~' rilogy, premiered as a
separate work in 1975. Kid. stakesa promises made without
anl.real lasting committment, made for the fun of the
moment, this was what Lawler wanted to show. It is in this
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play that we see Olive, who is ready for marriage, take the
lay-off instead.
Kid Stakes introduces us to the characters of The Doll
Trilogy in the first year of their seventeen year relation­ship.
The play has a young, carefree mood and let~ us see
the roots of many events that are referred to in The Doll. ,
In the first act Roo and Barney settle for the summer of
1937 in Emma Leech's boardinghouse, after having met Olive
and Nancy at the Aquarium, where Nancy made the crack about
the men being two fish out of water, a crack that Emma
remembers and throws back in Roo's face seventeen years •
later, when the fun is disappearing. We see the seeds of
Olive's fierce attachment to the lay-off sea~on when, after
a day of fun at Luna Park and a moonlight swim (good times·
Pearl cannot appreciate in The Doll) she tells Nancy that
she is ready to give up her respect.able position at the mil­linery
to be a barmaid so she can spend· more time with Roo,
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